No matter how sophisticated and grown-up we become, everyone has her insecure days. In this excerpt from her new book, Eve Ensler celebrates the true power of a woman (you guys know I'm all about that, right?). I got this from an editorial at Glamour magazine, and wanted to share to all emotional men and women, so read on.
Dear Emotional Creature:
I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple, or hike up your short skirt, or blare your music while you lip-synch every single memorized lyric (now, that's more like me!). I love your restlessness and your hunger. You possess the energy that, if unleashed, could transform, inspire and heal the world.
Everyone seems to have a certain way they want you to be - your mother, father, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, boyfriends, fashion gurus, celebrities, girlfriends. In reporting my new book, I learned a very disturbing statistic: 74 percent of young women say they are under pressure to please everyone. (You and I included...)
I have done a lot of thinking about what it means to please; to be the wish or will of somebody other than yourself. To please the fashion setters, we starve ourselves. To please men, we push ourselves when we aren't ready. To please our parents, we become insane over-achievers. If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your needs are? The act of pleasing makes everything murky (murky means dark or gloomy). We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We forget what we know. We make everything OK rather than real.
I have had the good fortune to travel around the world. Everywhere I meet teenage girls and women giggling, laughing as they walk country roads or hang out on city streets. Electric girls. I see how their lives get hijacked, how their opinions and desires get denied and undone. So many of the women I have met are still struggling late into their lives to know their desires, to find their way.
Instead of trying to please, this is a challenge to provoke, to dare, to satisfy your own imagination and appetite. To take responsibility for who you are, to engage. Listen to the voice inside you that might want something different. It's a call to your original self, to move at your own speed, to walk with your step, to wear your color.
When I was your age, I didn't know how to live as an emotional creature. I felt like an alien. I still do a lot of the time. I am older now. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be OK with being different, with being this alive, this intense. I just don't want to have to wait that long.
Love,
Eve Ensler
(Eve Ensler's new book is I am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World.)
2 comments:
If you get to know the real and intense version of me, you've got to see my passion beneath the hair and the make-up and the shoes.... I believe all women were born and raised to be "pleasers" in all sense of the word. Our parents and our cultural standards have injected this in our minds that we have to be something else... other than ourselves. I knew many women who lived their lives that way, and they never unleashed their true self and desires... and they just passed this world not knowing their power and potentials... That is really sad and I chose not to be that way.
I was lucky to have met many amazing women early this year in many networking events that I have attended. I knew I was looking for something undetermined that time, until I discovered that many happy and successful women acknowledged and learned how to unleash their passions and use their talents to celebrate their own powers... and that they knew ever since they were little that they were different, and it's OK.
Since then, I recognized that I felt the same way. Long, long time ago, I knew I was different than other girls, and it's OK.
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