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Exorcising the Question
What's Wrong with Me?
by Patricia Lynn Reilly
The journey from self-criticism to self-celebration is a warrior's journey through the critical words, images, experiences, and expectations cluttering our historical and personal landscapes. The journey calls for nothing less than a transformation of our inner worlds, a complete reversal of all we were taught to believe about ourselves. A mere rearrangement of our outer lives will not do. The journey will lead us home to ourselves and to our rich inner capacities and resources.
The journey from self-criticism to self-celebration is a shared journey. We join women from every age who have committed the forbidden act of stepping outside systems of thought and belief that denied their very existence. Intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally arrogant women who trust themselves and their own experience. Women who refuse to ask, "What's wrong with me?" Women who make a powerful statement with every thought they share, every feeling they express, and every action they take on their own behalf.
The journey from self-criticism to self-celebration is an essential journey. Our beloved planet is in desperate need of women full of themselves. Women who use their personal and communal resources to design woman-affirming solutions to the challenges confronting humankind. Women who give birth to images of inclusion, poems of truth, rituals of healing, experiences of transformation, relationships of equality, and households of compassion. Women full of themselves!
Exorcising The Question: Part I
What's Wrong With Me?
Many women grow up asking, "What’s wrong with me?" Our search for an answer consumes our valuable time, depletes our precious life energy, exhausts our limited resources, and distracts her from taking responsibility for our lives.
We frequent the therapist's office,
hoping the past holds an answer within it.
We fill the churches,
maybe God knows the answer.
We attend self-help meetings,
assured there is an answer encoded within the Twelve Steps.
We write Ann Landers and every other expert,
certain that they must know the answer.
We sit at the feet of spirituality gurus,
believing they will show us the way to an answer.
We buy every self-help book that hits the market,
confident that a new self-improvement project will quiet the question.
We consent to outrageous measures to guarantee our fertility or our attractability,
convinced a child or a lover in our arms will dissolve the question.
We sign up for diet clubs and plans and spas,
convinced that our bodies are at the core of the answer, whatever it turns out to be.
We spend hundreds of dollars on new outfits to hide the question
and on new body parts to eradicate the question.
And then at night after the day's search is over, we binge on a quart of ice cream or a bottle of wine, or we spend hours on the internet or telephone in tormented conversations trying to figure out why the current relationship isn't working, hoping that when we reach the bottom of the quart or bottle, or the far reaches of the net or conversation, things will have shifted deep within us and once and for all we will know the answer and what to do about it.
Yet no matter what we do in search of an answer:
no matter how much we lose or how slimming the dress,
no matter how expensive or authoritative the expert,
no matter how many babies, relationships, possessions we have or don't have,
no matter how spiritual, therapeutic, or recovered we become
we are left with the same question over and over again
as we look into the mirror horrified
that the restructuring of our relationship, our womb,
or our breasts did not quiet the question
there it is in the morning whispering from the mirror
"What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me?"
A mantra that accompanies us the length of our days.
Exorcising The Question: Part II
Remembering The Old Ways
There have always been women who remember the old ways.
Women who hold within them
the memory of a time
in the very beginning
when women were honored.
Women who refuse
to worship the gods,
to learn the language,
to take the names
of the fathers.
Women who refuse to twist
their female bodies out of shape
to fit into definitions,
to transcend limitations.
Women who love their bodies. Regardless.
Women who refuse to please others
by becoming smaller than they are.
Women who take space
with their thoughts and feelings,
their needs and desires,
their anger and their dreams.
Loud and strong
women from every age
wild women, spinster women
wise women, rebellious women
women who love women
midwives, witches
healers, activists.
Banners and placards aloft . . .
Eve, the Mother of All Living:
Take and eat of the good fruit of life. Take a big bite!
Sappho:
She Who Gives Birth Has Power over Life and Death
Mary Wollstonecraft:
Break the Silken Fetters
Sojourner Truth:
Ain't I a Woman!
Margaret Sanger:
Speak and Act in Defiance of Convention
Elizabeth Cady Stanton:
Whatever the Bible may be made to do in Hebrew and Greek
in plain English it does not exalt and dignify women.
Karen Horney:
Womb Envy is More Like It
Audre Lorde:
The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House
One by one the women step up
and commit the forbidden act
of biting into patriarchal thought
refuting it, smashing it,
discarding it and beginning again
in the very beginning when women
loved their bodies
named their gods
authored their lives
when women refused to surrender
except to life as it pulsated through them.
Women reminding us
there is nothing wrong
there never has been anything wrong
there never will be anything wrong
with woman
that's why nothing ever works.
Stop asking the question!
They speak the truth of a woman's life
told with heart, mind, and body
refusing dissection
they are women and poets and theorists
who gather our brokenness
into their words
an impulse toward wholeness
awakens within us
and we become again
as we once were
whole.
Fifty Things To Do
Instead of Reading Another Self-Improvement Book, Going on Another Diet, or Starting Another Self-Help Program
Imagine your life without the question "What's wrong with me?" as the organizing focus.
Here are fifty things to do with your newly available time, energy, and resources.
- Eat an apple.
- Breathe!
- Tape the stories of your mothers and grandmothers. Compile them into an anthology.
- Volunteer at a local nursing home.
- Write an editorial about the care of seniors in your community.
- Start an after-school program in your home for the children of single mothers.
- Find out about the world's first woman scientist.
- Read the biography of a nineteenth century suffragette.
- Rent "Bagdad Cafe" and invite your friends over for a Girl's Night Out. (GNO)
- ACT UP!
11. Plant an apple tree.
- Go for a long walk and then take a luxurious bath.
- Read the poems of Phyllis Wheatley.
- Volunteer as a research-assistant for a woman scholar in your community.
- Write a poem about your first best friend.
- Travel to gather women's stories from around the world.
- Find out about the world's first woman doctor.
- 19. Rent "Daughters of the Dust" for a GNO.
- LOOSEN UP!
- Bake an apple pie.
- Create a painting-space in your garage and free the images within you.
- Read the poems of Sappho.
- Volunteer at a battered women's shelter.
- Write a short story about your first job.
- Co-author a children's book with your grandchildren.
- Join a women's organization with a world-wide reach.
- Read the biography of a nineteenth century woman-physician.
- Rent the movie "Antonia's Line" for a GNO.
- SPEAK UP!
- Climb an apple tree.
- Create a meditation-space in your home and nourish the spirit within you.
- Read the poems of Ntosake Shange.
- Volunteer as a research-assistant for a woman minister in your community.
- Write a sermon using all the Scriptural passages referring to God as feminine.
- Start a school for girls.
- Find out about the world's first woman minister.
- Read The Woman's Bible.
- Rent "Thelma & Louise" for a GNO.
- LIGHTEN UP!
- Bob for apples with your women's circle.
- Create a dance-space in your home and free the movements within you.
- Read the essays of Audre Lourde.
- Volunteer as a research-assistant for a feminist physician in your community.
- Write a song about wearing your first bra.
- Plan a rite of passage ritual for the adolescent girls.
- 47. Find out about the world's first woman saxophonist.
- Read The Creation of Patriarchy.
- Rent "Fried Green Tomatoes" for a GNO.
- Bite Into Your Life and the Fullness of Its Possibility!
Excerpt from Be Full of Yourself ! (OWC, 1998) and Wake Up!: Spirituality Resources (OWC, 1999).
Permission is granted to use reading in ceremony or ritual with full citation, including author and source of excerpt.
www.imagineAwoman.com
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