VOF Week 4: (I Speak Human)

I am moving through life as a self-appointed Ambassador of Love, Compassion and Equality. I speak Human as my first language. Admittedly lofty, this “higher” vision holds me in steady connection to others and provides perspective when I’d otherwise fold into despair. Here’s the cyclical, intertwined, ying-yang dichotomy that makes me me: I believe in healing the world (vision), but work everyday in the thick of reality that usually points in the opposite direction (see vision).

Galvanized by the glaring need for social change and justice, I am profoundly committed to Gandhi’s declaration to “…be the change [I] want to see in the world.” Particularly when I was younger, I felt I was “different” for caring so much about people and the planet. Frequently peers would shake their heads at me and with hints of condescension, slap on such identifiers as “idealist,” “hopeless optimist,” and the ultimately disdainful, “do-gooder.” Yet this innate caring about the world never waned. Over the years, I have decided to shape this sensitivity into a beacon of power and use it for Purpose. This purpose has led me down a path in which women’s rights around the world have become the banner under which I proudly walk, my chant being one of equality. With strength of purpose comes the desire to reach out to more people and infect them with the passion to care. I want my passion to be contagious.

Enthusiasm is like a communicable disease. As someone who has led a nomadic life, I have come to discover this. My community is wherever I find myself, and being this self-appointed ambassador easily suits my nature and is an identity I gladly claim. Wherever I’ve been, there are social change and justice issues begging for attention. Currently, I work for a domestic violence organization in the USA. Simultaneously, I engage regularly with online communities focused internationally on Women’s Rights, Human Rights and the Global Women’s Empowerment Movement. Always, I am contemplating the issues and listening for the stories that should be getting more media attention, such as DV. They are not. Always, I am walking the line between my vision and the challenging (read: often discouraging) reality where such qualities don’t exist or hardly work.

Becoming a Correspondent is an opportunity to connect with a larger audience about the burning issues of social justice and work on forging solutions together. As a lover of words and a believer in everyone’s story, I am also drawn to the challenge of becoming better at composing them. And writing them out loud so that the world might hear. Therefore, it also fulfills a personal dream: writing for a larger purpose. This prospect feels like a divine offering.

It would be my privilege and responsibility to be a Correspondent for World Pulse. Such an endeavor aligns with my personal value system and the causes I believe in, resonating and amplifying them. Unquestionably, it feels like the natural next step along my feminist path – to join this growing forum for women’s voices with the numerous issues constituting the global women’s empowerment movement. As a Correspondent, I would welcome the twin opportunities to speak as a woman for women. From my perspective, as well as for the women I work with, letting their stories – so essential to be heard and so needed to be told – move through me as a Medium, or literary midwife is anther facet of my vision. The DV survivors I work with, for example, frequently ragged from crisis and the effects of abuse, would be glad to know that I, their advocate, could impart their experience and break the silence until they themselves regain strength and their voice. For they, as well as for each one of us involved with World Pulse, know the following statement to be true: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you” (Maya Angelou). I would be honored to become a Correspondent and work toward the collective good by finding, and writing, stories that we know need to be heard.