Adrienne Rich, photographer unknown. Image taken from a “Weird But
True” Facebook post
“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other… Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.”
― Adrienne Rich, “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978”
This came across my Facebook newsfeed recently and reminded me of my second round as an undergrad at a women’s college from 1975-80. I am very much a product of that era and community, where women were writing about our lives, saying things once considered too private to share. It was the “second wave” of feminism; NOW (National Organization for Women) taught us to hold “consciousness-raising” groups where we could openly talk about how misogyny appeared in our lives and how we could live differently. It was a culture of telling the truth, freeing ourselves by telling “secrets” that kept us feeling isolated and ashamed. I remember a fellow student in my Women Writers course talking about her abusive marriage. Things have opened up so much in the last 50 years that my description and Rich’s statements may seem quaint and no longer relevant.
It was in that environment that I, 21 years old, returned to writing. “Describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other”…that is the premise under which Rich led the writing seminar I took with her in 1976, my first college writing class, and what she led us in during the next two years of classes I participated in. This is how I tend to write, even though I wonder if today’s audience sees it as oversharing. That can be such a dismissive term.
This post is maybe too vague to be useful. It’s 11:30 pm on Day 4 of #NanoPoblano2024, and I’ve taken a Benadryl while I sit here blowing my nose
and trying to stave off the high anxiety of the election. So I don’t have time or focus to try to make this clearer.
Throughout my adult life I’ve encouraged women to tell the truth about their lives – my writing students, the women living in the transitional housing program I ran, certain young women in the youth center I ran – the truth liberates us, actualizes us, bonds us, empowers us. (As I write this, I’m doubting I was clear about this with my own daughters, focused as I too often was on the work I had to do outside our house and, to keep with my own admonition to tell the truth, in my own struggle to survive in my crushingly depressing marriage.) Bottom line: I compose a lot of impromptu personal-sharing essays in my head while I’m driving or trying to fall asleep. Not many make it to the page. I’m hoping this blog challenge will give me space and encouragement to actually write those essays and see if there’s anything of possible use to anyone else.
