Dawn Is Me

So, this month over at Women on the Verge, our topic is Women Changing The World — and we do, don’t we?

Further elucidation comes from Our Glorious Leader, Ana Lewis:

I am in awe of some of the things that people in our wotv community do on a daily basis. Women are changing the world – right here, today, and this is an opportunity for them to tell us all those things that they do every day to spread the message and achieve the mission that they are aiming to do – sometimes by themselves. They are no longer alone. We will help showcase how Women Change the World.

My very first thought was this factoid: in economic development circles it is well known that, if you give business development assistance to a man, he will improve his lot and that of his family but, if you give business development assistance to a women, she will improve her lot and take her entire community with her.

But that’s not what Ana was talking about. Not really.

If I want to turn the spotlight on myself, I could say, glibly, that any woman who is a mother is changing the world … one offspring at a time. That would be true, too, but that would be cowardly.

Sometimes, I hide behind my children. I love them passionately and will fight for the to my dying breath. But right now, where I’m at is all about me and what I like to think of as My Interrupted Journey.

Is it possible for me to think of myself as changing the world when I’m in a place that is All About Me?

So, what are you doing this year, Dawn, and what does it have to do with anything?

I am discovering myself and giving myself permission to be who I am and where I am most alive.

Where do I come alive? When I’m learning.

I find that everything about me is about learning.

My relationships consist of opportunities for me to learn from people. I learn from them about themselves and what it is like to view the world from inside their skin. I learn from them about absolutely anything about which they know more than I do. I learn how to connect with them. And, because people are continually evolving (or at least, the people I best relate to), there is always more for me to learn about them — so those relationships don’t have to end when I’ve learned all there is to know about and from a person. That just doesn’t happen.

I learn about things and then I write about them in my newsletters and my white papers and my research and my books.

I learn about myself and I write about that here.

I learn about my children and that helps me to parent them.

And, of course, there is the minor matter of returning to school. No need to state the obvious, right?

The fact is that everything I do is a learning opportunity, because that is the way I see it. It’s possible that nobody else on the planet sees it that way, but that’s not important.

So, what did I need in order to give myself permission to be this learner? I need to be physically, emotionally and psychologically safe.

I am an abuse survivor. Fear has been a very big part of my life so far. It gets in my way in more ways than I have time to describe here. The fact that I have continued to function has been itself an act of bravery.

So, in order for me to feel free to keep learning, I have to believe that (a) I can protect myself, (b) there will be people in my life who will love me and want to protect me, and (c) there will be times when I will get hurt or otherwise threatened but it won’t be anything I can’t handle.

My job, as I see it, will be to convince myself of that by figuring out how I got to where I am right now and, more importantly, finding ways to prove to myself that it’s true.

And where does changing the world fit into all of this?

That’s easy. What I learn, I share.

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I AM A WOMAN ON THE VERGE

Women Change The World is our theme for 2012 and for the month of January. Please join in the conversation by joining WomenontheVerge.net, on Twitter @WomenontheVerge, on Facebook or by listening and chatting on the WOTV monthly radio show (where I am a panelist) on January 18th from 7pm to 8pm ET on BlogTalkRadio.

I’m late. I missed the traditional 2011 New Year’s Eve retrospective post. And that is just as well because I don’t really have anything to say about 2011 except to be glad that it’s over.

I’m sure the entire year couldn’t have been entirely awful but the last six months of it was so terrible that I don’t really remember the first six months of it. Let’s see …

July = disclosure and arrest of the ex-spouse
August = grand jury hearing, eviction threats
September = Tropical Storm Lee and flood; 20 credit semester starts
October = move into new apartment but takes 3 weeks to get online
November = pneumonia; sentencing hearing
December = lean holidays and the year finally ends

Time to forget all that crap and get our groove on. There’s a limit to how long I can do Perils of Pauline before I start to get on my own nerves. At this point, I’m ready to start moving and acting to improve my situation in every way. And I’m engaged on a project of envisioning my life as I would like it to be because I learned long ago that, in spite of how New Agey it sounds, visioning works. It has worked for me before and I am prepared to let it work for me again.

So, what’s on my agenda? Well, my J-Term class starts in another week and I’m looking forward to that. I like the professor and am looking forward to the class. Then, there will be spring semester, when I’ll anticipate a lot of fun and challenging class work and more. School is a treat for me because I like learning things and my grades are usually pretty decent ego fodder for me.

And I keep running in to people who think I’m younger than I am.

I want to be happier about my looks this year, too. That will entail losing weight but, even more so, it will entail replacing the image I have of myself (which I got from my departed ex-spouse) with something closer to reality. My daughters keep trying to convince me that I’m not really the fat, middle-aged hausfrau that I imagine myself to be. I’m beginning to believe them. This is a good thing. More visioning.

I want to begin to return to prosperity in 2012. That will mean continuing to work at the Mart of Wal for as long as I need to but it will also mean looking for funding opportunities to do research projects that can be attached to healthy grants. I want to get my blog and my newsletter going again but I’m a lot more interested in research right now because the politics and policy stuff starts to get circular and cyclical after awhile and that gets boring after awhile.

And I’m going to start dating again in 2012, even though it’s hard to envision that right this minute. I’ve been out of circulation for so long that I don’t even know what that looks like anymore. Even so, I have learned some things about myself and understand that I need to get serious about deciding what I don’t want in a relationship. I have a long history of settling for what I got because I thought that was all I deserved and all I could have. Now, it’s time to stop that. First order of business is convincing myself that I do deserve the kind of relationship with the kind of guy I want. Then I can wait for what I want instead of settling for whatever comes my way.

That’s scary for me but I expect I’ll get over that eventually. I’m lonely but I refuse to be desperate. Still more visioning required.

I guess it’s pretty clear by now that I have very high hopes for this year. The long nightmare is over. That is the first and most important part of all this. All that is left, for me and my family, is the long trek out of the darkness and toward the light. We are already well on our way so it’s easy to be optimistic at this point.

I want to take a moment to say a very special thank you to all my friends for all your love and support. You are wonderful people and I don’t know what I would have done without you these past months. Having walked with me through my personal hailstorm, I hope that you will stick around for the good stuff.

You didn’t really think I would only share the carp and not the good stuff, did you?

Happy New Year!

I’m still in school and its still running my life.

I’m got used to thinking in terms of my kids and school, so college semesters (where you cover in three and a half months what they take nine and a half months to cover) always seem to take me by surprise at the speed with which they gallop by.

I’m about a week away from Thanksgiving break. When that’s over, there will only be another two weeks of classes before finals.

I’ve got a crap-ton of work to do.

I’m taking six classes this semester. I have huge, colossal papers to write for two of them, papers we’ve kind of been working on all semester, plus another, minor paper in a third course. Fortunately, I don’t have finals in any of those courses.

I do have finals in the other three courses, though. They are things like Spanish I and Statistics, where you kind of can’t write papers. And the only reason we’re not having a paper and a final in Fundamentals of Archaeology is because my professor has been unwell and probably won’t have the energy to grade them.

All of which reduces to the fact that I’m not exactly going to be vacating during my Thanksgiving vacation.

But that doesn’t matter. I expect to be doing a lot of homework and housework during those five days but I also am very much looking forward to the holiday. Gina gets home from Ithaca on Friday. We’ll all be together for a week.

And we have more to be thankful for than we have in a long time.