“This is how you’ve been imprinted to use your power – you use it against yourself. Everyday we create reality based on what we’ve been programmed to believe. So we spend most of our lives not thinking clearly and coherently – not initiated thought. We spend a great deal of our lives not really living, but existing in programmed reactive belief that we call thought.
We can blame the oppressor, the predatory mindset, we can blame it forever, and it doesn’t mind. It doesn’t care.
We need to use our energy, our intelligence, in an alternative way to the way we’ve been using it” John Trudell
This is the quote the book begins with. I met the author on TV today and she threw me a thought curveball. As the quote says, what if everything I’d been brought up to think, believe, and do, was not really me and what I think and feel and wanted to do?
I was born and raised in small-town America. I’ve only lived in three houses all my life (til now) and those houses were all within ten miles of each other. I graduated in a class of 50. I loved my parents. They made me feel safe. Too safe. In high school I was afraid of alcohol. I had to find a college where there was no drinking or drugs. (I ended up being one of 4 Catholics in a Bible belt Protestant college for this reason) I was actually alive in the sixties, and I missed it. The sixties, to me, consisted of a few fleeting pictures of people they called hippies sitting in white gowns on street corners in a foreign place they called LA and some soldiers and students doing something they called rioting on college campuses. The sixties to me, looked scary and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I thought news on TV was boring and never began watching it until I was grown up and married, so I not only missed the sixties, but the fifties and most of the seventies, too. My entire world consisted of my house, my tiny school, and the local KMart (then called Big N). We lived rurally and I couldn’t get to friends houses, as we only had one car that my dad took to work. So I made up my own world, complete with dreams of my future, based on life as I knew it.
It was written, without question, that I would grow up, get married out of high school, have kids and live my mother’s life. Now, looking back, most of my friends in school that tried that, failed miserably and I would have too, without some divine intervention that (or just maybe the beginning of a thought of my own about what I wanted for my life) said NO vehemently that I did not want to live my mother’s life – I wanted to go to college (unheard of in my family) and have, not just a job, but a career. Whatever God or Godess was looking out for me, I am forever indebted to him/her. My grandfather, who lived with us, used to yell at me – “What you want with college? Lot of money for what? Get married. ”
Anyway, I might continue that story tomorrow because it might come in handy someday. The point of today is the book that led me to take a look back to find the answers to some things I struggle with today. The book is by an incredibly inspiring woman, Kelly Cutrone. The title is “If You Have to Cry, Go Outside and other things your mother never told you. “
Written for women and girls, it’s very thought provoking, while at the same time, once you get over the fact that you may have duped yourself about what you really wanted out of life, it’s comforting to know it’s never too late to do a little self evaluation and realize you hold the power to change your path….and the strength.
And so, another day goes by, my heart and mind wander and search, and I have written.
Leave a Reply