Frozen Nowhere

I have been thinking a lot, lately, of my personal power and how little of it I OWN.

You see… I wasn’t raised to believe that girls had any real power. Girls were supposed to be delicate, fragile, powerless creatures. We were things protected by the fierceness of our fathers, our brothers, our boyfriends, our husbands… without all these wonderful POWERFUL males to encompass our soft fragility we would be nothing.

What a load of BULLSHIT.

Yet, for YEARS I didn’t question this notion of male power. It was taken for granted, in my upbringing, that I would follow the Path that my family wanted for me – I would dutifully get my high school education, go to university and get a suitable degree in a nice cushy area of generalized “Arts and Sciences”, find a suitable man from a good, upstanding family, marry, have children and go on to continue the lines.  In my early years my grandmothers taught me the “womanly arts” – knitting, sewing, baking, cooking, gardening, cleaning, needlework – and the ways of female society. I hated it.

I was dragged to church to learn obedience and faith. I was dragged to learn to fear the male POWER that the Christian God represented and to learn (apparently) that this same power resided in not only the ministers of God, but all males — and that someday, if I was “good enough” I would be lorded over by a husband who would have ultimate say over me.

GAG ME.

Early on in my career as a woman (pretty much right after menarche) I rejected Christianity and the ideal of a Patriarchal God-Being that preferred men to women.  I out rightly denied the tenets of Christianity in my first attempt to “find myself” in my teens… and ultimately became a Wiccan.

You’d think that having rejected the God-Man-Power Triumph-ariate (yes, I made that word up) I would have awoken to my own powerful nature. But while I rejected the Male-God-Power-Over bullshit in favour of a more balanced Male-Female-Power-Sharing spiritual ideal I never quite made the mental leap to intimate relationships being equal partnerships…

In SPIRITUALITY I was willing to raise and celebrate my own power, yet I continued to life my mundane life as if my gender identity meant I needed to be cared for and protected and lorded over by the Godhead of a male figure. I continued in my social life, to believe that I needed to have a boyfriend and eventually a husband, to fulfill the female destiny and to take my place in society.

UTTER. FUCKING. BULL. SHIT.

What can I say, hindsight IS 20/20,what I can see standing on the fallout of 36 years of life shows me that I had the power all along, I was just afraid to use it. And what was more, that someone, somewhere KNEW that girls had power, and tried to teach the impressionable ones (like myself) that wanted to please, that in order to  have a place in the world they needed a MAN to hold them up.

So, here I sit… resting on the baggage of 36 years of experience on this earth, and what do I see clearly:

• Everyone, from my grandmothers to the school system to the formalized religious institutions, was AFRAID of the power that I held. Instead of teaching our girls to embrace their powerful natures as much as our boys, our culture seems to have tried to deny us the power.  Men hold power, women cower. Despite how far we have supposedly come, there are still people teaching their daughters to FEAR being FIERCE, SELF EMPOWERED PEOPLE, and I was one of those daughters!
• The abuse I suffered from theEx came about because, right from the beginning of the relationship, I handed him not only the right to use HIS power but MY power as well. I would never have accepted the “I am your husband, I have the RIGHT to make the final decisions” bullshit if I hadn’t BELIEVED he had in some ineffable, inalienable RIGHT given to him by virtue of his owning a fucking PENIS! This belief in this could be explained by virtue of upbringing and culture, but more than that I need to OWN the fact that I never once scrutinized these things or challenged the way they were.
• The best way for ME to change the world, is for me to change MY world. That means CHALLENGING the things I take for granted and NOT letting the world wash over me as “the way it is”.
• I can start now, challenge the way things are and find the way they work best FOR ME without it bringing down the whole of the fabric of society.
• And for THAT matter, the idea that we have to follow certain customs or norms in order to maintain this fabric of society? That’s another load of bullshit.

So… also looking back, things I wish that I had known these truths:

• Have a man if you want, but don’t be afraid to leave him.
• You have the right to change your mind, even in love.
• Divorce is not failure.
• No one has the right to abuse you physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally, financially or sexually.
• Protect your body from harm but if someone does you harm SPEAK UP and don’t be ashamed for THEIR actions.
• You don’t need to get married; you can choose to get married.
• Love is not something to be hoarded or something that only one group of people is allowed to celebrate.
• Babies are a blessing, not a curse. Don’t marry for the sake of children.
• Never quit learning, and don’t ever let anyone tell you learning something is a waste.

Now is the time for me to Challenge the status quo and come into my power…

I hope it’s not too late for me….