Narrative 3
Her Words Found Me
I am somehow hurriedly making cards again. Only this time, it is the middle of the day and I cannot spend any extra time finessing when I should be sleeping. It’s a different kind of stress. These cards really matter to me, and I hope they will work. But this time their use is not desperate, but generative.
In about an hour, I am meeting with two other co-design practitioners who I really admire. They don’t explicitly call themselves feminists, but I think they are. Or, at least according to my new ideas about what this means. It turns out that I had been looking for feminism in the wrong places. I am now in the process of cultivating a new collective and a new orientation. I’m still in a pandemic and working remotely, but it is so much less lonely already.
***
I’m blinking through tears when I hear my partner ask ‘are you ok?’
I look up across the table surprised out of my reverie and quickly laugh: ‘yes! sorry, this writing is just so good.’
I am chuckling because it must look ridiculous, but inside there is still an unexpected, cathartic, rush of emotions flooding out of me. This is exactly it. I am reading the words of someone else, but it is as if she is pulling these words out of me. The ideas grasp at a loose thread coming from my chest, each page drawing out and relaxing a tension that has been winding more and more tightly within me over the last year. Whatever scaffolding had been holding that tangled spool in place finally gave way earlier today.
I had been reviewing my previous two years of work -- of feminist work -- in the preparation for an upcoming PhD milestone. Photos of workshops are still layered under the new browser windows I have been opening and closing in my search since the snap. In the background, these images are still sharing space on my screen with my favorite articles on methods like critical participatory action research, or other community-led practices. I agree so strongly with the values and principles contained in these documents. I have poured over those toolkits so I could adapt and apply these values in my own work.
And yet, when I looked at the juxtaposition of these case studies with images of the recent events and experiences in my own practice, the contrast could not be reconciled.
Maybe I am not a feminist afterall, I had thought. The idea was unsettling, but also felt a bit matter of fact. Detached. The hard evidence seemed to confirm it. I had never questioned this before.
Quietly, my hand guided the mouse to the library search bar where I typed:
becoming feminist|
Surely, there must be others who have wondered.
I clicked on the first result: Part 1 Becoming Feminist, Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed...