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ItalianoDo Not Castrate My Womanhood for Your Political Agenda
| After three years away from Europe, I returned to the Nordics for the first time, planting my feet in Iceland. There has been a tug pulling at my heart to return to the North, feeling suppressed and burnt out in what I'd say is the hellhole of planet earth right now (the US, which is anything but "United"). If I had the same perspective three years ago, I don't think I would have left Sweden. But for over a decade, I spent most of my time in Europe; any time I spent in the US, my gaze was focused on returning back across the Atlantic Ocean. I didn't ever really try to live in the US as an adult. And so, any problems I analyzed with culture and life in Sweden, I blamed on Sweden. In hindsight, most of the challenges I scrutinized were not specific to Sweden. They were often related to civilized urban living, the way that the world turns when subscribed to the status quo... No matter where you are. The irony is that in turning my back on my lifelong goal of living abroad, I returned to a new-to-me region in my home country, to slowly become suffocated by a community of Puritanical-infused status quo. Also, ironically, to happen in one of the places that claims to be the most liberal and open-minded (it's not, and so the suffocation becomes infused with hypocrisy -- something I am horribly allergic to). That's a little bit of background behind the below writing, I originally wrote for my Substack (I've just included part of it here, but the full essay is over here. For three years, I've felt my soul whither away, beginning with a relationship where nudity and freedom and art and travel were a threat. I don't have many regrets, but that year and a half is one of them. The cost was too high: my soul, my confidence, my sense of self. A year and a half after it ended, I'm still trying to rebuild myself. And that rebuild? Still I've hit speedbumps -- this time not from a relationship in which I'm a threat... but a relationship that has celebrated my art, only to sexualize it. Where my art has strived to be innocent, and my nakedness has first and foremost been for me, I've felt yet another part of myself whither away when practices that were healing for my soul are consumed by someone else. At this women's retreat in Iceland, I felt layers of protection come down. I felt my energy open again, no longer closed off to prevent unwanted consumption. And as those layers began to peel away, I saw how unwelcome I am in the town I've been trying to build a life in. A town, a society, where being a woman no longer means anything, other than being a threat to others. As layers melted away, I felt rage building -- a feeling that I think we suppress as women, because we don't know how to express the emotion in healthy ways. Anyway, this opened the door to the below thoughts. ♥️ --- Hello from an involuntary return to America from three wonderful weeks in Iceland. As I settled into the rhythm of the Nordics again, it felt like I had been there for ages. A single day stretched on for what felt like two, and I found stillness and presence in a land where I have always felt a deep sense of belonging — one that I have never felt in the U.S. During those three weeks, one of those was spent at a healing women’s retreat. Honestly, I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into. As a self-portrait artist, I’ve admired Icelandic Selkie’s modeling work for so long, and I knew it would be some kind of combination of art, nakedness, and photography. What I didn’t think about when signing up for the retreat was that being in such a container meant that I would be in a cabin surrounded by… only women. This shouldn’t be a surprise when you sign up for a women’s retreat, and in the sense of A + B = C, it wasn’t. But I have a deep wound around sisterhood, and I didn’t think about how that wound would feel to be surrounded by women for five days. As I reflect on the healing magick of Iceland, there are the obvious highlights of healing and subtle, unexpected ones. The subtler they are, the deeper the healing.  The subtlest of them all was the healing that I felt in being in a circle of women who were proud to be women. There was no question of what our pronouns were. We were women. Plain and simple. We didn’t have to convince anyone of our femininity, or feel like our biological sex was offensive to anyone. This is something I didn’t know that I needed to feel. I have been in the Pacific Northwest for far too long, and the clarity around this level of healing landed when I was faced with returning to Bellingham. In the day leading up to my departure from the land of fire and ice, I felt so much rage and hatred rise in me (you know, like an Icelandic volcano) toward Bellingham — to the point I had a meltdown about having to come back to a place where none of my bones feel like they belong. I live in a town that talks about how progressive it is, and yet my art and my way of life has been attacked countless times. It’s a place where I’m told I should be celebrated, and yet I have been on the receiving end of scrutiny. It’s made it difficult to make my art and continue to show up in the world. In Iceland, it was different. I was celebrated, rather than a shrug of the shoulders (or a target for someone’s anger). That’s what they say: go where you are celebrated, not where you are tolerated. And in Nordic countries, I have always been celebrated. People are excited about who I am and what I’m doing, and they want to dive into projects. In Bellingham? It has been little more than crickets to my existence. Rather than do what I’ve always done — judge myself for feeling angry, gaslight myself that I am wrong — in processing my rage, I am trying to keep an open mind to the emotions, and unpack the information it’s delivering. With so much rage, there is the deeply rooted feeling that it doesn’t feel safe for me to be here. It doesn’t feel safe to be fully expressive without filters, nor to create my art. And you know? I think some rage around that is justified. I have been suppressing it for so long that it has made me sick and endlessly depressed. I don’t belong here. Not in Bellingham, and not in America. I’ll be sharing another essay on that later, but the relevance here is this: another layer of healing began at the retreat. The first petals of both my heart and my sacral began to open again. Layer after layer of protection have wrapped themselves around these two energetic centers, causing me chronic illness and creative blocks for months, if not years. In being surrounded by women, the layers began to peel away. Because amongst women, I wouldn’t be preyed upon. We could be naked together and simply exist. Our nakedness wasn’t at risk of being seen as an unwanted invitation. We didn’t have to defend ourselves against unwanted eyes. We didn’t need to worry about being devoured without our consent. In this sacred space, my nervous system recognized a kind of safety I’d forgotten existed. At first, I interpreted this protection as a reaction to my personal experiences with men over the years, but as I returned to Bellingham in a rocketship of fury, I saw that the second layer of this protection had been caused by living in a society where my womanhood is offensive to a political agenda. There are no spaces for women anymore, and our bodies and existence continue to be labeled as wrong. Our nipples, our wombs, our ability or willingness to procreate, our identities as feminine beings. So many of us have been conditioned to carry guilt and shame for simply existing as a woman. We are back to being the villainous Eve eating an apple in the garden..... (Continued at the link below.) Full essay here, on Substack. |
Tillagd 30 dec 19:09 Kultur- och faktaartiklar #Kvinna #Resor #Personligt #Samhälle #Vår kultur
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