If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it.
Interpretation
If you cannot alter the situation around you, adjust how you view it instead.
This quote by Audre Lorde emphasizes the power of perception in the face of unchangeable circumstances. It suggests that while we may not have control over external reality, we can choose how we interpret and react to it, thereby influencing our experience and emotional state.
In practice
During a motivational speech about resilience and mental health.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
Don't think about making women fit the world -- think about making the world fit women."
Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.
It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realize that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality.
You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.
Tomorrow the revolution will 'rise up again, clashing its weapons,' and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!
After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career β in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad β watching the people within those borders burn.
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