Follow Your Bliss

Pegasus Books, Cuba Mall, Te Aro, Wellington 6011, New Zealand

There is an email earmarked in my inbox linking to an interview with Joseph Campbell, where he discusses how to follow your bliss, that I took time out of my *busy #sabbaticalled schedule to watch recently:

“If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you. And the life that you ought to be living is the one you’re living somehow. And, when you can see it you begin to deal with people who are in the field of your bliss and they open doors to you.

I say follow your bliss and don’t be afraid and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

A quote like this puts me in mind of Bob Dylan’s Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which is a resource I return to again and again, especially as a writer struggling to keep self-sabotage at bay.

“Where do you look for this hope that yer seekin' / Where do you look for this lamp that's a-burnin' / Where do you look for this oil well gushin’ / Where do you look for this candle that's glowin' / Where do you look for this hope that you know is there / And out there somewhere?”

Being on [Chris’s] sabbatical, while fraught with privilege, has put me back on track to follow my bliss. I have the time and space to look for hope while out on my daily speed walks. How do I know I’m on the right track? Because it feels as though while wading a stream that hasn’t yet been bridged, stepping stones pop up one by one underfoot, in time with my crossing, to keep my feet dry. It feels like I’m creating something, just by living, and whenever I get that familiar feeling, I know I’m following my bliss.

It started a few weeks ago, listening to Marc Maron’s WTF interview with Sarah Polley, in which they discuss her now Oscar-winning screenplay for Women Talking. The women in Polley’s movie evaluate three possible responses to sexual abuse within their Mennonite colony: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the colony.

Then came Legacy of Speed, a podcast about this photograph from the 1968 Olympics:

which I’m familiar with from my poster-selling days but hadn’t before considered the importance of. Malcom Gladwell discusses economist Albert O. Hirschman’s book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, which lays out three options available to those with a grievance: exit (boycott), voice (stay and speak up), or loyalty (stay, keep quiet, and hope your commitment pays off in the long run.) John Carlos and Tommie Smith, the Olympic runners in the photo, chose voice, and it destroyed their careers. I won’t spoil Women Talking for those of you who haven’t seen it; the women make a different choice, just as valid.

When I juxtaposed the two podcasts, it struck me how both presented the identical set of tools to engage oppression. Both podcasts reveal options - exit, voice (stay and fight) or loyalty (stay and do nothing) - activists can use to facilitate change. The coincidence of listening back-to-back to these two podcasts began to seem purposefully designed.

Then came Because of Anita, which includes a discussion between Professor Anita Hill and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Talk about women talking! From this podcast I discovered another famous image - an ad in the New York Times, paid for by over 1600 Black American women who wanted their support of Anita Hill documented in the historical record.

Professor Leslie Hill holding the NYT ad “African American Women In Defense of Ourselves”, originally published Nov. 17, 1991 (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

When asked about their motivation for testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee as an act of citizenship, both Hill and Ford describe it similarly:

Ford:

“For me it was in a way a calling…from the country, or from my civic duty, as a citizen, that I had to say something.”

Hill:

“When you have something, and you feel that it’s important, that it’s critical, actually, then you can stand up in a different way then when you’re thinking about it in the abstract. For me the whole idea of patriotism and why I felt it was my responsibility and duty came not just as a citizen but also as a member of the bar. I had felt in my life how important the Supreme Court’s decisions are…and I knew firsthand the importance of…a court having integrity, and the integrity of the court was only as good as the integrity of the members of the court…Also, my civic responsibility came not just as a member of the bar but as a teacher, to students who were going to be members, and in teaching I not only tried to teach them the law but I also tried to teach them their responsibility to the law.”

Bingo. Of the tools available to activists I’d just learned about, both Hill and Ford chose voice, they chose to stay and fight. Out of a sense of duty to whistle-blow bad behavior that would otherwise negatively impact a judiciary accountable for the good of all. But their efforts came to no avail. Even though TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS elapsed between the appointment of Thomas and Kavanaugh. Has nothing changed, I asked myself? Instead, as Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, we saw Amy Coney Barrett replace RBG. While we may momentarily talk truth to power, power will continue to silence us for generations to come.

Hm, I needed to get my hope back. Because of Anita is only four episodes long, and I kept listening. Finding your bliss might just mean making sense of your life, but I don’t want to have to be on sabbatical to do that. I want to do that everyday. And I don’t want to have to wait another quarter of a century for perspectives to change. What the heck is wrong with these tools we’re using, as activists, I wondered?!

In Because of Anita’s final episode, Journalist Irin Carmon offers a few reasons for why progress seems to have stalled. First, government still does not view sexual harassment or assault claims in the same way it does other whistle blower stories. And second,

“The standards by which we evaluate credibility tend to reward winners. So if we are evaluating why should I trust this person over another if it’s an incident in which only two people were present, for example, then we’re using an inherently biased system to say who is more credible. Because the Catch 22 here is that if a survivor was irreparably harmed by what happened to them and they went on to miss work, quit, well how easy is it then to say: ‘oh well she’s just disgruntled. she’s just unhappy that things didn’t work out for her here.’”

This explanation really blew my mind. So it isn’t (as it may, in fact, seem) that the social justice movements I’ve been a part of since high school have not made one iota of progress. It isn’t that feminism has failed. See, we’re not crazy! It isn’t that grassroots activists have toiled for three decades in vain. Instead, “we’re using an inherently biased system to say who is more credible.” Carmon offers us at least one reasonable, rational explanation for why a quarter of a century after the Senate Judiciary Committee disregarded Hill’s testimony, they did the very same thing to Ford.

Now we’re getting somewhere I thought, and as I walked and listened, it’s following my bliss that got me here. I knew what step to take next - as an activist, I knew what inherently biased system to challenge next.

Following my bliss makes me feel like I’m learning from life. But more than that, it has allowed me to write this elaborate blog post, sewing my thoughts together into a coherent narrative, connecting them like a sticher would a quilt. Making something out of nothing to arrive at a larger understanding about how to take the conversation forward in the direction I want it to go, in the direction of the truth. At least until I happen upon evidence of another inherently biased system, which I then need to launch into fighting with all my might.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v8

Photo depicts staffers and co-founders of Ms. Magazine, including Gloria Steinem

Dear Editor,

Ruth Bader Ginsberg said this in 1993:

“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices.”

fox news launched in 1996.

The reason RBG has always been important to me is because she framed the issue of abortion as it relates to the freedom and rights of the MOTHER. By 2005, when I was in grad school, the issue had already been hijacked by the conservative, religious right-wing, who manipulated the conversation around abortion to frame it in relation to the freedom and rights of the “unborn.” At the time I could feel the backslide, I knew feminism was loosing its foothold, I just didn’t know what to do about it.

The fall of Roe v. Wade evidences the decline of feminism; we have got to turn that decline around. Now that we’ve been debilitated back to 1973, we have got to wrest back that frame. We are not our mothers, or our grandmothers. We cannot be forced to live like they did, simply too much time has passed.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v7

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

Dear Editor,

I have been thinking a lot about blame (which surprisingly is *not* one of the stages of grief). I don’t want to hear one more person lay the fall of Roe v. Wade at the feet of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I blame trump voters but at least there’s a through line in what they believe - first, they believe him, second, they believe fox news, and third they believe in an invisible, extra-terrestrial higher power called god, and it’s now the decrees of that belief that determine what living, breathing women can do with their bodies (and this coming from someone [me] who sometimes go to church:)!

But I also blame the rest of us and am struggling to find the through line there. How is this our fault? The simplest answer I can come up with is that we haven’t been political enough, because it’s too painful and too uncomfortable be political. I hate talking about politics in any situation that may cause even the slightest distress, especially with people who aren’t as “progressive” as I believe myself to be.

But as of now our reality is being legally defined by people who believe that bringing every pregnancy to term is what is best for the physical and emotional well-being of ALL women. By people who believe adopting out an “unwanted” child to strangers will be less painful for a new mother than terminating the pregnancy would have been. It’s our reality that is being legally redefined and if we don’t start talking about - and keep talking about - why we demand the right to abortion than that reality could disappear all together. Without Roe vs. Wade you really are going to need to become involved in politics at the local level and educate yourself about pro-choice candidates and elect them, which might sound overwhelming, but if we don’t do it now then our reality will literally disappear. How depressing.

On Mothers, Michelle Obama, & growing up in Chicago

Photo by Alex Nemo Hanse on Unsplash

For International Women’s Day 2021, I was intrigued by the theme: Choose a Challenge.  I know, I thought, I’ll pick implicit bias, and my mother! What could be more challenging?

On January 10, 2017, during Barack Obama’s Farewell Address to the nation, I first learned Mrs. Obama’s maiden name. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. I remember Mr. Obama pronouncing it in full and being surprised by how “Black” it sounded. My name is Michelle too, and since 2008, whenever I met someone new I’d introduce myself by saying: “I’m Michelle, with two LLs, like the First Lady.”  Over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency, I became, and remain, a fan of his wife. And like most fans, my interest in Mrs. Obama was based more upon what that interest said about me as an individual, rather than on anything in particular about her. During the turbulence leading to the 2016 election, I took comfort in the speech where Mrs. Obama coined the phrase:  “When they go low, we go high.” But it wasn’t until Mr. Obama’s Farewell Address, when I heard him say his wife’s name in full, that my interest was piqued. She had a name that sounded like Jenny’s, from the Block. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. Hm, I thought, before she became a political and feminist icon, and international emblem for simple decency, had she just been an average, middle class Black woman? I wasn’t sure, so when her autobiography Becoming was published, I read it. 

The description of the home where Mrs. Obama grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and where she lived when she worked as a lawyer and met Mr. Obama, captivated me:

“On Euclid Avenue, we were two households living under one not very big roof.  Judging from the layout, the second-floor space had probably been designed as an in-law apartment, meant for one or two people, but four of us found a way to fit inside. My parents slept in the lone bedroom, while [my brother] Craig and I shared a bigger area that I assume was intended to be the living room. Later, as we grew, my grandfather...brought over some cheap wooden paneling and built a makeshift partition to divide the room into two semiprivate spaces.”

This living situation sounded familiar; in fact, it replicated almost exactly what my mother wrote about her experience growing up in an Italian neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, near Grand and Pulaski.  Here’s how my mother describes it:

“The inside of the basement apartment had a small bathroom, two small bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a small living room. Whenever I was in the house, I was only an arm’s length away from someone else. I slept in one of the small bedrooms with my mother, my father slept on a hideaway bed in the living room, and my brother slept in the other small bedroom. The emphasis on my place was, you guessed it, small.”

The likeness was so obvious, my immediate thought was: as an average, middle-class white woman, my mother should see herself in Mrs. Obama. Except she doesn’t.

My mother credits her upbringing with endowing her with fortitude and resilience. And although my relationship with my mother is complex, one thing I know for certain is that she created an enriched environment for me to grow up in. It astounded me to think that Barack Obama’s wife, the First Lady of the United States, had grown up in a tiny space almost identical to the one my mother grew up in. That would mean, I realized in wide-eyed astonishment, that Michelle Obama’s mental fortitude rivals that of my mother! [Duh!]

Politically, my mother and I are at odds, but fundamentally I revere my mother, I love her, and fear her, but in a good way. The unsettling thing, for me, is that I did not see my mother in Mrs. Obama the minute she took the stage in Chicago, after Mr. Obama’s victory, in 2007. I didn’t see her there because Mrs. Obama is Black and my mother is white.

The only encouraging thing about all this, is that although my mother may not see herself in Mrs. Obama, I do, now. And my daughter, who was born on the day Barack Obama won re-election, always will.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v4

Dear Editor,

If your readers are worried about Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court, they should be. And if your readers marched in protest on October 17th, 2020, I’d like to thank them for marching for me. It’s been simpler for me to accept what Barrett’s appointment will mean while still fighting mightily to protect the rights we will lose, as best I know how. Every day, EVERY DAY, I think of those six-year-olds shot in Sandy Hook; yet federal protection of the Second Amendment will be strengthened. Every day I think of the words of Maxine Waters as she spoke them at the 2017 Women’s Convention in Detroit:

“Keep your hands off our backs and our goddamn bodies!”

Yet federal protection for reproductive rights will be overturned. I’d like to tell your readers: This is happening on our watch.

Dr. Willie Parker notes:

“Liberals may hear about [anti-abortion] laws enacted elsewhere, in states where they are not likely to live, that require counseling and waiting periods, widened hallways and hospital admitting privileges, and shrug...From the relative safety of the blue states, voters who support abortion rights can be insulated from the devastating impact new [anti-abortion] laws make on women’s lives.”

I’d like to tell your readers: Do not let this happen to you. Barrett’s appointment means we will need to spend the next forty+ years fighting everyday to keep from losing the basic rights our mothers procured for us. If you don’t or can’t remember life before Roe v. Wade, read “The Story of Jane, the Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” by Laura Kaplan. Roe v. Wade stated that abortion is a medical decision to be made by a woman and her doctor. That’s all it protects, and the right to that decision is what Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and especially Barrett, are going to take away from you.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v3

Photo of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford giving testimony

Dear Editor,

In the days of my youth the phrase we used for what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified to experiencing at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh was “date rape.” Most of the girls I knew who suffered date rape did so as members of a church youth group and in fact, the date rapists were usually boys in the same church youth group. Date rape meant three things: 1) you knew the assailant, but not well; 2) you blamed yourself for what happened; and 3) you didn’t mention it. Except word always got out, because generally the girl who’d been date raped and then had to keep silent about it would be traumatized just enough to make a half-hearted suicide attempt before recovering more fully (if that’s possible).

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in 2018, throughout Dr. Ford’s testimony, many American women recognized that with Kavanaugh’s inevitable appointment, the same type of man capable of committing date-rape with which so many women are familiar - that can result in a forced pregnancy - would be the very same man responsible for criminalizing abortion, thus removing choice on both ends of the conception spectrum. It was simply too much to bear. It still is.

Dr. Willie Parker notes: “If a woman is not in control of her fertility, she is not in control of her life.” Date-rape is (sadly) common enough, even still, and in plenty of instances a woman becomes pregnant without choosing to do so. That has been the case since time immemorial; abortion access gave her back some control. With Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment, you can bet we’re one step closer to losing it, at the federal level, for good.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v2

Dear Editor.

I am angry. I have been angry since Election Day 2016. It’s amazing to me that this anger has ceased to subside; it’s a little like grief in that way, it simply burns true day after day. I’m angry that as a working mom I have to dedicate any spare time to the Resistance, which means, as an introvert, having to spend my Saturday afternoons in anguish, phone banking for Democrats. I am especially angry about the fear that drives my anger to exhibit itself in unexpected ways, like a crying-jag in public. And I am not alone. I can name scores of other women, who, like me, are angry. These women are changed, some (you’d be surprised how many) have quit their jobs to join the Resistance, to lead it. These women have been transformed into activists.

Now you might ask, why does this matter? What has the transformation wrought? I can tell you this, these women are living differently, every spare moment (and just ask a woman how carefully life must be ordered to allow for a spare moment) is spent educating themselves about this current political reality and using the activism tools they have created to fight back, run for office and broaden the progressive, liberal ideals with which they were raised. I am angry, and I know now that I should have been angry LONG before the 2016 election. The interesting thing about this anger is that it has birthed not violence, but generosity and action. It is a wellspring of motivation that these women have used to create communities.

Today when I realized that being in the “Resistance” actually just means taking part in our democracy, my anger suddenly subsided a bit. I’m thankful to have been forced to participate and take action, to fundraise and phonebank for Democratic candidates who will defend progressive politics. Yes, I am still angry that a conservative Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade; but I am grateful, finally, to have learned the hard way the value of taking part. Taking part IS the same as fighting for. And I will never stop, taking part.

I hope you won’t either.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v1

In September of 2020, I began writing a series of Letters to the Editor of the New York Times, which I submit, but which are, needless to say, never published. The letters are lamentations, mainly, on dealing with the consequences of, as I saw it originally, a post-trump reality. What I’ve learned since is that what, for me, was “post-trump”, was just normal, everyday life for other people.

I write these letters to self-soothe, whenever my Current Affairs anxiety needs leveling.

Dear Editor,

When I was teenager, about the age a mother-daughter relationship is just beginning to transform into a friendship, my mother told me a story she’d told many times before, but with a new twist.

When she became pregnant with me in her late twenties, she was ecstatic. My parents were married but their relationship was rocky and she wasn’t sure where he stood on the subject. So she made an appointment with a doctor to listen and learn more about abortion. This was 1975, only two years after Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now an option for her, a freedom she had the right to exercise. “I wanted to have you,” she told me, “but I wanted your father to choose you, too.”

He did, and I was born. But it was the abortion right that helped my parents commit to having a family. When it came time to have my own family, I felt honored to access the same right to a safe, legal abortion as my mother. I, too, did not exercise it and now have a beautiful daughter.

The terrible thing is, I desperately wanted to have more children but after battling endometriosis was unable to conceive a second time. And at the same time I lie awake at night drenched in fear that Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment and Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death will destroy the one freedom that made my family possible. The right to an abortion did for my family what it was supposed to, it allowed me to choose to have a family. How can I now be expected to parent a daughter knowing she will not have that same right? I already carry with me the painful burden of unfulfilled longing for more children; now I must brace myself to say goodbye to my daughter’s right, as a woman, to seek an abortion and, terrified for her future, carry that burden too.