• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1021 0

primates I met in the Congo, offering them as a model of how women at the household-to-household level can influence communities into peaceful society. I developed a workshop inspired by the brilliant social architecture of Twelve Step programs, the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, and modern sexual abuse and trauma survivor therapy. The workshop would be exportable to any community and open to men as well as women. As Margaret Mead said, every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man. Also, many men have no idea the effect their addiction to power and degrading women has on us, and them having the opportunity to sit in groups with women who have suffered abuse is an underused strategy. The workshop would incorporate, inter alia, feminist analyses of one’s past and present life, include trauma and shame reduction experiential therapy, role playing, inner child work, art therapy, and identification of compulsive behaviors and addictions, and suggestions for after care and advocacy. The crux of the experience would be for each participant to identify core patriarchal wounding in their life, begin to recover from it, and accept responsibility for advocating feminist social justice change in their communities in whatever way is most meaningful to their personal narrative. Once we begin to recover, we can be most useful in precisely the ways we have been most hurt.

I couldn’t have guessed that my own story would have everything to do with feminist social justice theory and that the gifts I had been given of clinical inpatient treatment and recovery would bring me back to radical feminism.

The paper won a dean’s scholar award. Diane told me when she felt down, she’d read my paper again, and it would put wind in her sails.

I graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School on a glorious day in May 2010, surrounded by some of my dearest friends and members of my families of chance and choice. In a reprise of my college graduation, my mother and sister chose not to attend the ceremony, but Dad was right by my side, along with Mollie. And Tennie, my most wonderful surrogate grandmother, brought her quietly radiant, affirming presence to the commencement, marveling with me at the 468-year-old tradition in I which partook. After I had sung “Fair Harvard” in Latin and had run around hugging classmates and thanking faculty, she presented me with a beautiful necklace on which dangled a key, with a framed reading that said, in part, “There is no more ‘aloneness,’ with the awful ache, so deep in the heart.… That ache is gone, and never need return again. Now there is a sense of belonging, of being wanted and needed and loved … We have been given the Keys to the Kingdom.” The Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Indy Racing League would not excuse Dario from a half day of press obligations related to the 500 (which he would win that weekend for the second time), so he sat in his bus on the track, watching the school’s live Internet feed of commencement, while we chatted back and forth via texting as the exercises unfolded.

After the stately procession through Harvard Yard, the various schools dispersed to smaller venues around the campus to hand out the diplomas. The Kennedy School crowd looked like a United Nations General Assembly, with the foreign students wearing their formal native dress: Africans in colorful dashikis and foulards, Asians in jewel-colored silks. Ever the mountain girl, I went barefoot as I bounded across the grass to accept my diploma. As my little cheering section rose to clap and whoop for me, I felt down to my toes that I was just hitting my stride, that truly anything was possible.

I’m not sure where this journey will take me. All I know is that I’ll always be traveling on the front lines of hope, expecting miracles to happen.

Remembering.

On the path to God, light gives way to darkness, and darkness to light, at intervals. A measure of integration takes place, and we enjoy a moment of peace and joy, but the longing sets in again, and we must again exert the terrible effort.

—CAROL LEE FLINDERS,