Surfing the Waves of Herstory

The world yearns for laugher, love, light. People clamor for empowerment and education. Cultures are ready for stories of peace, prosperity, health, and humor. We want to transform our stories from those of victimhood and pity, to ones of accomplishment and collaboration. I feel the oncoming paradigm shift in storytelling, from a problem exposing narrative to a solution driven one. The documentary film world has seen this shift, with previous successes anchored in the exposure of problems, to present success dictated by inspiring stories of success, determination, overcoming, and calls to action offering solutions to current problems. This wave will threaten to wipeout traditional, male dominated media as well, and I want to be surfing hang-ten on its crest. If a shift in perspective changed my world, a shift in perspective can change everyone else’s, together as one.

Of course there’s a need and place for women reporting from the front lines of conflict and injustices... Yet, I come from the perspective that soon these will end at the hand of women, so I look for my role in these times of transformation and beyond the years of barbaric turmoil. My fingertips on a keyboard will be the swords wielding out against injustice to carve a space for positivity and empathy. Stories of women’s triumphs around the world will inspire others to follow courageously, young women will see the options they didn’t know they had, and opportunities will be created for and by women when the whole world sees what we are capable of, and it is through journalism & communication that we can make this possible.

The media desperately needs balance and I want to be a catalyst that helps tip the scales. If traditional media is a boy’s club, this training will give us the tools to start our Girl’s Club New School of Journalism for the 21st century, one with positive images of women, featuring our successes, findings, developments, complexities, addressing our needs and concerns in a caring way. This will shift people’s perceptions of women worldwide, at the work place, the home, on gender roles. It will bolster the changes also occurring in the market place and government, where feminine attributes will be necessary and are already on the rise to recognition. I am not asking for a hostile take over, just some equilibrium. We’ve tried the masculine systems for hundreds of years and… they’re not working. So let’s give us women a chance, I invite you to hypothesize on the results of such experiment. What will female-run media be like? Politics? Education? Health systems? Journalism? Data from a survey by J. Gerzema and M. D’Antonio (of The Athena Doctrine) shows that countries where people infuse feminine traits into their way of thinking have a higher quality of life and higher per capita GDP!

Having, like Charlie Brown with one toe in the water, dabbled in radio, documentary and here writing, VOF is now my chance to fearlessly dive in and swim with the big fish. I aim to combine my skills to create empowering programs for women, to document women’s stories of resilience and expose the world to the power of the divine feminine in order to shift the power structures that currently rely on outdated models set around masculine principles. I aim to use all available outlets to magnify the voice of women, in order to make herstory, because history will look different if we include her in it.

Certain instruments must meet at this intersection to play the chords of our success… a platform and outlet, education and training, some direction and a chance… A chance to show the world that I am, that we are, and will be worth this opportunity of becoming a Correspondent. When this becomes my future, women will be the leaders, and I will join their ranks, traveling the world as a conductor of knowledge, connecting women, issues, solutions, organizations, speaking, writing, capturing the images of this movement, and I’ll know that it was World Pulse and this beautiful community that supported me so, giving me a board on which to surf the waves of this future.

I’m diving in.