As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narratives of their own…women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it.
Interpretation
Women need to connect and share their experiences to shape their own narratives and destinies.
This quote emphasizes the importance of women sharing their personal stories and experiences with each other. It suggests that isolation prevents women from forming a collective narrative, limiting their abilities to influence their own destinies and recount their lives meaningfully.
In practice
During a women's empowerment event to encourage sharing personal stories.
Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]
Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.
And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.
It's not sissy to show your feeling.
The most important relationship you have in life is the one you have with yourself. And then after that, I'd say once you have that, it may be hard work, but you can actually design your life.
One of the reasons we stay so alone in our lives is because we're ashamed to talk about the hard stuff. It's as simple as that. We're all in pain in different ways, and we don't get the help we need because we're too ashamed to talk about the pain.
The moment love becomes a relationship, it becomes a bondage, because there are expectations and there are demands and there are frustrations, and an effort from both sides to dominate. It becomes a struggle for power.
You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems, . . . And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled , what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and--well, we iron things out together, that's all.
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