Claiming Our Power

by bee

Tomorrow is March 8, International Women's Day.

Among other relevant historic events, it commemorates the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (New York, 1911), where over 140 women lost their lives. The idea of having an international women's day was first put forward at the turn of the 20th century amid rapid world industrialization and economic expansion that led to protests over working conditions. By urban legend,[1][2] women from clothing and textile factories staged one such protest on 8 March 1857 in New York City[citation needed].[3] The garment workers were protesting against very poor working conditions and low wages. The protesters were attacked and dispersed by police. These women established their first labor union in the same month two years later.

i read . . .

An excerpt from Meet Me on the Patio by Karl Olsson.

No one takes my life away from me. I give it up of my own free will. I have the right to give it, and I have the right to take it back. The more we know about who we are, the more we can accept that, and the more wholeness we have.

We are not talking about power and control. Control is external power a person assumes out of insecurity. Hence, control need not be real power. 'When there is an equation between who I am and the power I exercise, then I am in balance and I can be a creative person and feel OK about myself. To not feel OK about myself may cause me to try to control situations which are beyond my power.

We lose our effectiveness and our creativity because we trade away our power, our identity, our being, for something less. It happens all the time. We have seen it in submissive women and in submissive men. They have given over their power to someone who had no right to it. The result has been destruction of identity and destruction of creativity. To give someone your power is not to help, but ultimately to destroy him or her.

For instance, we may give someone the power to dominate us and to manipulate us. When we do that, we have given up the best part of ourselves. People who become overly dependent on us, we may transfer our power to them. Then we are under their command.

"We give someone the power to use in this way when we're afraid to say no. We give up our right to self-determination and we become snowed under the responsibilities we don't want to carry because we don't dare to say, "I can't do that"" or "I don't want to do it" or "I'm not going to do it."

Parents sometimes do this with children. They have given the children their power, opening the door to bribery and permissiveness. Because no one is willing to stand up and be his or her own person, children and parents both suffer.

Why would you give up your identity, the most precious thing you have, to someone else? Perhaps the chief reason is to avoid conflict. There is no courage to withstand conflict.

Sometimes we give up our power because we think that to be good and to show love means to comply, to please, to be nice. We have been taught to be nice. The most important thing in life, we have been told is to be pleasant and to avoid conflict. Husbands and wives are nice to one another - not honest, but nice and they give up their power.

Sometimes I give up my power because I don't want to pay the price to keep it. I may give it up to avoid the responsibility of being an adult. To be adult is free and exciting, but it is also very difficult. So, instead of paying the price of being an adult, rather than take risks and bear the pain of being accountable. I give up my adulthood and let someone else become an adult for me.

In the process of abdicating our power, we waste a great deal of energy. It's as if we use all the energy we can command to keep ourselves in a position of powerlessness. We lost a sense of wholeness; we lost our creativity.

Against that background of draining away creativity, draining away identity, draining away power, I want to tell you a little of my own story. Some time ago I was acting in ways that robbed me of energy without my knowing it. I began to feel very tired. I was always dreaming about going to bed. Over many months I went from one illness to another. In the midst of all this, I began to lose my creativity. I began to lose my sense of identity. I began to lose my initiative. I began to lose my interest in putting things together. My life, my work, and the things I usually enjoyed doing felt flat and stale. I became apathetic.

I didn't know what was the matter until I discovered, to my amazement, that for about two and a half years I had been progressively giving away my power. I was functioning within narrower and narrower limits. I never expressed an honest opinion for fear that I would hurt someone. I never acted decisively for fear that I would rock the boat. After I'd recovered, I mentioned this to a friend, a very perceptive person, and she said, "I noticed that. I noticed that you were much nicer than you normally are. I thought it was sort of sick." I said, "It was."

Without knowing it, and imperceptibly, I had been transferring my power over to other people because I didn't want to be responsible for decisions. I became nicer and nicer. In fact, so nice that I was stupid. I was feeling sorry for myself. My attitude was passive.

I decided all this had gone far enough, and I was going to turn the whole business around and begin to act decisively and I did. I did something extremely painful for me and extremely painful for some other people. But I made a decision and I communicated the decision. I suddenly discovered a polarization of support around me which I hadn't known existed. I saw that to have an identity and to be my own person meant the right to let myself erode. I didn't have the right to stop dreaming.

I want to call you to claim your power and your identity. I want to call you to the great creative adventure of being yourself. I want you to believe that you are someone and that you have power. If you have given away your power, reclaim it. You should love your neighbor as yourself. That means to love, celebrate, and delight in yourself.

What is giving someone else your power? It is the action whereby we stop being ourselves and over-identify with someone else.

Questions to think about: Why do I relinquish my power? What effects does this have on those around me? What can I do about this?

i wish . . .

women everywhere (and the men who cherish and support them) strength, success and peace.

- Bee