Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes our courage. You have to fail to practice being brave. (Mary Tyler Moore)
While sitting in my tax person’s waiting room the other day, I happened upon a fascinating article in the USA Today, entitled Typos Can Be an Act of Feminism. The thrust of the article was that women’s perfectionism, their need to get it right, was doing us in, causing undue stress and limiting our creativity. The article went on to also applaud the edgy risk-taking of women today who are daring to suggest new ways of being, of having the guts to address issues about which they are not experts but for which they have definite intuitive (and often highly creative) solutions, of taking the risk to speak out in new ways and in arenas in which they have had little experience. Without having to get it right or have all the answers or be “as good as” or better than . . .
Because we don’t need to do that, if we ever needed to.
At first, I was distressed and frustrated — this was a dialogue we had when I came of age in the ’60s. Surely we’d come further than that in the last five decades. But then I realized this was also likely the same discussion our mothers and grandmothers of the ’20s and ’30s had, and theirs before that in the suffragette era of the very early twentieth century. And theirs before that . . .
And every generation is a bit further along! Good for us all, as individuals and as a society. It can indeed be somewhat dismaying to feel like we’re having to reinvent the wheel — that what should be a simple reality has to be reasserted and reasserted. It certainly speaks to how embedded certain ideas are in our collective mentality, and how those mind-sets get entangled with our personal psychologies.
As women, we all KNOW in our heads that we do not have to meet any external standard, or other person’s opinion about our being, our performance, our appearance, or our personhood beyond that of fulfilling objective contractual responsibilities —- but sometimes, and especially because we have been and are a part of what has been a highly patriarchal society and culture with some pretty definite institutionalized ideas about who we oughta be, it takes our hearts a little longer to catch up.
It really is okay. Mabe we can all be breve enuf to make mor typoes.