SHE & HER

Description

A woman with an unwanted identity is someone who bears with herself a very silent form of tiredness. The identity fits her so well as if it has been chosen by her, causing her to doubt anything else. Words spoken again and again have the ability to make the truth about her, creating a structure which makes her reality and guides her through words which she did not choose. I recognized the pattern in how women speak about themselves. In the contradiction between what they say they are and what they actually do, what they actually want, what they are actually capable of. In the moment when a woman realizes, sometimes with shock, sometimes with relief, that she is not finished. That the identity was never a conclusion, only a construction. That the person she became was not inevitable but chosen, repeatedly chosen, every day, even when the choosing felt automatic. The book grew out of that recognition. It came from understanding that there is a particular kind of work required when a woman decides to reclaim authorship of a life that was shaped by others, by circumstance, by the descriptions that accumulated and hardened into rules.