I Am Subject Stories: Women Awakening: Discovering Our Personal Truths

By Diane DeBella

Telling my story was the most difficult task I have ever undertaken, and I did not make the decision to do so lightly. In fact, it took me fifteen years to gather the courage to tell my truth. I know that I would never have found the strength if it had not been for all of the brave women who came before me—the women who found the courage to give voice to their own truths—through poems, short stories, novels, essays, speeches, and memoirs: the women whose life lessons helped me come to understand and appreciate my own.
It has been nearly a year since I sent my story out into the world. What I wished at the time was that one woman would read it, its message would resonate with her, and she would share it with another woman and begin a conversation. While I am thrilled that the book did spark such interactions, I could not have predicted what happened next. As women began to reflect upon their own life experiences, they wanted to share them—to pay it forward—to add their voices and offer their life lessons to others. As a result of this strong desire, the I Am Subject project was born.
This anthology consists of 36 stories detailing women’s powerful moments of claiming themselves as subject of their own lives. Our truths do indeed matter, and when we give voice to them, we can often find support and shared community. As a result, when we heal ourselves, we often help others. I am filled with gratitude for every woman who shared her truth, and I know that within these pages you will find messages that offer hope and increased insight into your own life’s journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780996078566

Book preview

Selves

CONTRIBUTORS

Discovering Our Personal Truths: Family History

Lori Schafer

Donna J. Dotson

Carol Fragale Brill

Erika M. Schreck

February Grace

Catarina Massa

Zvezdana Rashkovich

Maia Caron

Cody Van Houten

LaTanya A. Davis

Discovering Our Personal Truths: Body And Mind

Mary Rowen

Lorrie Colin Spoering

Carissa Harwood

Carly Dee

Natalie Ziemba

Tina Proctor

Katie McCune

Discovering Our Personal Truths: Internal And External Roles

Amy White

Leigh Tysor Olsen

Erin Leary

Sarah Hackley

Emily K. Michael

Sarah Brentyn

Susanne Doering

Avery Caswell

Judy Pollard Smith

Discovering Our Personal Truths: Life-Altering Moments

Jen Rubin

Shari Deeken

Maria Ashworth

Constance B. Wilder

Reagan K. Reynolds

Hilary Johnston

Karen Kritzer

Tess Bartlett

Monica Devine

Cairenn Rhys

FOREWORD

By Diane Debella

When we tell our own stories and share our own truths, they become so much more.

Telling my story was the most difficult task I have ever undertaken, and I did not make the decision to do so lightly. In fact, it took me fifteen years to gather the courage to tell my truth. I know that I would never have found the strength if it had not been for all of the brave women who came before me—the women who found the courage to give voice to their own truths—through poems, short stories, novels, essays, speeches, and memoirs: the women whose life lessons helped me come to understand and appreciate my own.

It has been nearly a year since I sent my story out into the world. What I wished at the time was that one woman would read it, its message would resonate with her, and she would share it with another woman and begin a conversation. While I am thrilled that the book did spark such interactions, I could not have predicted what happened next. As women began to reflect upon their own life experiences, they wanted to share them—to pay it forward—to add their voices and offer their life lessons to others. As a result of this strong desire, the I Am Subject project was born.

Together with Anora McGaha, founder of Women Writers, Women’s Books, we put forth a call for submissions. We realized that women often lose their sense of self to external roles, expectations, and objectifications. Many times, we don’t even realize that we are no longer the subject of our own lives. Yet, if we begin to strip away all of the external layers—those that define us by the roles we play—what would be left? Who would we be? We invited women to share their own powerful moments of claiming or reclaiming themselves as subjects of their own lives.

More than 70 women from across the globe responded, and as I read each story, I was incredibly moved by the heartfelt authenticity of each writer’s experience. Yet, as I put on my editor’s hat and tried to envision individual pieces coming together in an anthology, I experienced a brief moment of panic. Obviously, each woman’s experience was unique, and each story I read had little in common with the previous one, or the one before that. I began to wonder if it was indeed possible to meld the stories in such a way that each woman’s truth would shine, and each story would flow seamlessly into the next.

Of course, I should have known better. As I continued to read, common themes and patterns began to emerge organically from each piece, regardless of a woman’s country of origin, socio-economic status, age or race. And just as I had discovered when I was researching the lives and works of numerous women writers for my collective memoir, I was struck by how each of our unique stories contains common threads that when woven together create a beautiful tapestry that is a woman’s experience.

This anthology consists of 36 stories that fall within four overarching themes related to women claiming or reclaiming themselves as subject of their own lives: family history, body and mind, internal and external roles, and life altering moments. I have provided a brief editor’s note before each section. Like my own story, some of these truths are painful; all of the stories are powerful and genuine. Our truths do indeed matter, and when we give voice to them, we can often find support and shared community. When women claim themselves as subject of their own lives and share that experience, they move beyond self-empowerment to provide strong examples for others to learn from as well. As a result, when we heal ourselves, we often help others.

I am filled with gratitude for every woman who shared her truth, and I know that within these pages you will find messages that offer hope and perhaps increased insight into your own life’s journey.

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Note: Spelling and grammar choices vary throughout this volume according to each writer’s country of origin.

Discovering Our Personal Truths:

The Influence of Family History

EDITOR’S NOTE

The Influence of Family History

One of the most significant life lessons I have learned—and I learned it primarily by studying what other women have dared to reveal about themselves—is the depth to which I have been impacted by my family of origin. In fact, I was in my 30s before I truly began the difficult examination of how significantly family dynamics and relationships influenced the type of person I had become, and affected my own interactions as a wife, mother, friend and colleague. I excavated my past like a true archaeologist, carefully sifting through the fine grains of sand that contained my history, deeper still beyond my own parents to their families of origin. I proceeded methodically, layer by layer, delicately uncovering my ancestry so that I could finally come to a greater understanding of who we all were and why we interacted as we did.

In this first section of stories, you will find the truths of 10 women who, each in her own way, found the courage to engage in this difficult and at times overwhelming work in order to reclaim, and in some cases affirm herself as subject of her own life. Lori Schafer beautifully captures the importance of remembering and honoring our previous selves, the girls and young women we once were. By making space for the girl she had been, and the trauma that child endured, Lori is able to appreciate all of her strength and perseverance, and come to a better understanding of the woman she is today. Donna J. Dotson also shares her own journey of reclamation, a process of growth that, with much patience and hard work, allows her to build a genuine relationship with her father.

Carol Fragale Brill provides us with tremendous insight into the moment that she truly sees her mother for the first time, not only in her role as parent, but as a woman who had suffered tragic loss yet continued to put one foot in front of the other as best she could. Erika M. Schreck also shares a story of recognition and awareness as she examines her role as caretaker within her family and the impact that continuing to serve in this role has had on her own life’s journey. February Grace depicts the pain and anguish she experiences for choosing to follow her own path, rather than blindly accepting the religious teachings followed by her family, while Catarina Massa teaches us the importance of self-love, especially when those who are supposed to love and protect us violate that trust.

The beauty of our ancestry is lovingly traced by Zvezdana Rashkovich as she pays tribute to the long line of strong and determined women who came before her. Maia Caron details her discovery, at age 20, of a cultural ancestry she knew nothing about—newfound knowledge that eventually leads her down a path toward healing and growth. Cody Van Houten shares both the joy and pain that can be found within the complicated histories of blended families, and LaTanya A. Davis revisits the moment that she reclaimed her own life, and the lives of her children, by breaking the cycle of dysfunction within her family of origin.

Lori Schafer

On Writing My Memoir

I forgot her.

I hadn’t intended it. I didn’t mean to forget, or to set her aside. I didn’t plan to consign her to the fog of some distant past, or to the blur of some hazy future. I had no plans for her at all. I didn’t even realize that she was missing. I did not know that she had been forgotten.

About a year ago, this young woman I had banished from my memory returned without warning. I know what prompted it. I found my mother’s obituary online. She had died, without my knowing it, six years before.

My mother was gone. Her insanity and the cruelty to which it drove her would lie forever buried, vanquished by the final failure of her physical being; she would never return. But that young woman would.

She came to me first in the guise of a story. Not a memory, but a story, a short piece of fiction that bore a striking resemblance to a vague recollection I had of her life. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t real. How could it have been?

A short time later, she came again, with another story to tell. To quiet her, once more I put her in fiction. But I didn’t examine her character closely. She couldn’t bear examination, and neither could I. Still, she kept coming. She appeared before me, month after month, in story after story, until suddenly I realized that the stories were no longer fiction. They had diverged unexpectedly into other forms, into nonfiction and narratives, essays and vignettes. Short bursts of truth expunged onto paper.

They meant little at first. A memory here, an incident there. Never very personal, and never very real, at least not to me. Events that had indeed transpired, but in another woman’s life. Not in hers, and certainly not in mine.

I continued to write them down nonetheless. They were compelling, these bits and pieces of someone else’s past. Some of them sad. Some of them frightening. But after a time, it hurt, telling her stories. It was no longer merely an exercise; I began to feel it, someplace inside. Someplace I had forgotten I still kept inside.

They were horrible stories. A mother’s psychosis. A daughter’s terror. Stories of pain and isolation, of threats and violence. Stories of a woman who needed help and never knew it; stories of a girl who cried for help and never received it. Stories of hunger and homelessness, of the ever-present fear of capture and the deathly slow torture of starvation. Stories of a runaway shivering through cold autumn nights filled with loneliness and desolation. It pained me to tell them so I stopped. I had forgotten that girl and her stories two decades before. What sense was there in bringing them back now?

I put them away. But I could not put her away. She would not go quietly, as she had 20 years before, when, more than anything, I had needed to leave her behind. This time she stayed; this time she waited. Until I was ready to tell the rest of her story.

It happened unexpectedly one spring afternoon, just a few weeks ago, when the sun was shining brightly and a stiff breeze was blowing across the rooftop where I like to do my writing. The last six thousand words, the ones I had been holding back, the ones that told the rest of her story. Not of what had happened to her. That I had told already, the factual version, a clinical history of severe mental illness. No, these words finally revealed how I felt about it, of what it meant to me, deep down in places I don’t care to explore. How sorry I am for her pain. How deeply I feel for her, that young woman whose life took such dreadful and devastating turns. How deeply I feel for me, for having to remember. For how much it hurts me to remember.

I found myself weeping as I typed, weeping over a long-distant past, the words blurring before my eyes as, for the first time in twenty-some years, she came sharply into focus, that girl that used to be me. How hard it is to hurt for someone else. How much harder still, to hurt for yourself.

I had tucked her away into the deepest recesses of my mind, into the darkest corners of my heart, that unfortunate young woman I once knew so well, so intimately, that I could not have distinguished between her and me. I thought I could leave her behind, as I had left my family behind; thought I could forget, get by without her.

But that day on the rooftop with the sun warming my face and the wind whipping away my tears, I knew this could not be. I had lost a vital piece of myself, of who I am and who I was. I had to reclaim her, to re-forge the connection between her and me, to integrate us, the former she and the current me.

The following day I added the final segment to my memoir. It depicts perhaps the most important part of our journey together because it’s the story of our transition, from her into me. The story of how a dauntless young woman somehow managed to dig her way out of a hole of despair, to hold onto hope in a sea of hopelessness, to fight a battle she had little to no chance of winning. Because what I discovered, when I opened the door to let her back into my life, was that much of my strength lies not with me, but with her. And, as I find myself facing a new set of trials, I finally understand how much I need her, how firmly I must grasp hold of the young woman I used to be, for she, more than I, has the power to persevere, to overcome, to survive.

Perhaps I do not like the memories she brings. Perhaps I would prefer to allow her to settle quietly into the dust of my personal history, to let her remain forever buried, as my mother is now. But with her inside me, I need not shy away from fear, from pain. She copes with fear. She handles pain. She is, and always has been, subject.

I cannot be subject without her. But together, we can be.

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Lori Schafer, USA

Lori’s flash fiction, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous print and online publications, and she is currently working on her third novel. Her memoir, On Hearing of My Mother’s Death Six Years After It Happened: A Daughter’s Memoir of Mental Illness, is being released in October 2014. You can find out more about Lori and her forthcoming projects by visiting her website at lorilschafer.com.

Donna J. Dotson

My Bridge to Build

My dad was a man of many talents. He could grow his own food, cook it and preserve it for winter. He could fix anything with a motor, and he could quote scripture appropriate to any and every situation. My father was a carpenter by trade, but he did not build bridges. He could build beautiful houses and magical creations out of the simplest piece of oak or maple or pine, but he had no special talent for connecting with a daughter he dreamed would be a son. He