The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

Sometimes you have to unname something before you can define it for yourself.

Not only do they control our lives in unwanted ways, but unfelt feelings stay in the body “like small ticking time bombs,” says Christiane Northrup. “They are illnesses in incubation.”25

Ursula K. Le Guin’s comment: “I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers.”23

Feminist thealogian Carol P. Christ states that a woman’s awakening begins with an “experience of nothingness.”13 It comes as she experiences emptiness, self-negation, disillusionment, a deep-felt recognition of the limitation placed on women’s lives, especially her own.

Here is one of the principles of women waking: If you don’t respond to the first gentle nudges, they will increase in intensity.

When a woman wakes up, it’s not experienced in isolation. Her family, the people she’s closest to, will be thrust into the experience as well, because it’s not just the woman who’s expecting a new life.

The truth may set you free, but first it will shatter the safe, sweet way you live.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s words, “When a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized,”4

take what seems yours to take, and leave the rest.