If you’ve been following me here, and on my insta, you know I’ve been thinking a lot about healing from perfectionism.
I had another revelation recently.
My perfectionism, especially when I turn against myself is about controlling whether people like me or not.
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What would happen if we stopped caring about being liked?
I have realized that the thing that keeps me stuck in not stepping out and saying what’s true for me, is trying to edit and restrain my bigness. My bigness got me into trouble when I was little. If I was too big, I would upset the adults around me, especially my father whose rage was so, so big. I learned early on that speaking my truth, especially if it went against a prevailing power, was scary and bad.
Knowing me as she does, my dear friend and healing practitioner Dr. Liz Dobbins recently challenged me to piss off 10 people this week.
Because, as a big personality in the world, if I’m not pissing people off, I am not doing my job as a disrupter of the culture.
And one culture that needs to be disrupted is the Patriarchy.
The Patriarchy is pervasive. And old. Centuries old.
Recently, at Mama Gena’s Mastery workshop in NYC, she reintroduced me to Dangerous Beauty, a film that takes place in 15th century Venice, Italy, a place and time when women were either brides or courtesans. There was no other option.
For the theme of the second weekend at Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts, we were invited to dress as our dark side. I dressed as the slut bride. Because the messaging I received growing up, and the story I made up from there was either you are a slut or you are a virgin at your wedding; there is no in-between.
Today, what little progress we’ve made for women’s rights in the last century is being stripped away by Patriarchal draconian dogma. As I write this, yet another state has made it illegal for women to have governance over their own bodies.
Keeping women, especially women who lack resources or education, pregnant and broke, keeps us all stuck in the revolving door of surrogacy; our bodies are subjugated for someone else’s profit.
We need to link arms as women, for together we are strong, and if we buy into the conditioning of the Patriarchy, we will remain isolated, separate, and alone in our suffering.
We can dismantle the Patriarchy, starting with the voices in our own heads, and the hands we take into our own hands.
