Self-awareness is essential whether you’re leading others or just yourself.
Regardless of your gender, if you haven’t already, please, please, please watch Women Talking. Don’t watch it because it won Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2023 Academy Awards.
Watch it for the timelessness and timeliness of the message.
It stirred and disturbed me deeply. It illuminated my anger. It nourished my compassion for women.
Coincidentally, I had just began reading the well-researched, compellingly written Rage Becomes Her: The power of women’s anger by Soraya Chemaly.
In the intro, the author tells of witnessing her mom “standing on the long veranda outside our kitchen, chucking one china plate after another as far and as hard as she could into the hot, humid air. Our kitchen was on the second floor of a house that sat perched at the top of a long, rolling hill. I watched each dish soar through the atmosphere, its weight generating a sharp, steady trajectory before shattering into pieces on the terrace far below.”
In 1964 I came home from high school and greeted my mom in the living room. She responded, “I broke your Supreme record.”
That was all that was said.
I don’t recall that she said she was sorry. She might have. I didn’t ask how it happened. She didn’t say. She didn’t offer to replace the album with the singers wearing long, velvety green dresses featuring “Where did our love go?” I didn’t ask her to.
For some reason, I wasn’t upset with her. I didn’t cry or ask why. There was something about how she said it that made me feel that what happened wasn’t personal. Almost like it needed to happen.
That was all that was said, but not all that I understood. Maybe this was me somehow knowing she had a very valid reason for chucking her china down the hill toward our creek.
The more I read in Rage Becomes Her of the deeply embedded social constructs designed to suppress women from even acknowledging their anger, the more I began to understand my own that boils over when I’m told to calm down, to not get so upset because that’s ‘just the way it is’ – essentially to be something other than angry, to be someone other than me.
Chapter 10 is next. It is about What now? What to do with all the rage?
Maybe it will come down to what the movie poster says: Do nothing. Stay and fight. Leave.
Stay tuned.
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