The most important work I will ever do is to bear witness to my life, to affirm that my life matters even if it does not look like anyone else's life.
When I started Her Head in Films a decade ago, I didn't know at the time just how radical my project was, or how life-changing it would be. I was essentially a nobody who was told from an early age that I was worthless, invisible, and forgettable.
For my entire childhood, and even into my adulthood, this world shunned and excluded me. Who was I to speak? To share my story? To believe I had anything of value to share? But, in the face of all that rejection, I still shared my voice, and I created a space where I could be heard.
I dared to be emotionally vulnerable, to talk about the unhealable wounds of loss, to be honest about loneliness, longing, and trauma. I have never tried to fit in, to conform, to promote myself, or to turn myself into a brand.
No one from the film industry or online film spaces has ever paid any attention to the podcast. I am not popular or cool or influential.
What I am is myself. I have created the podcast as a way to be heard, to bear witness, and to explore the life-saving power of art. I have unapologetically centered my thoughts, my feelings, and my subjectivity. I have been uncompromising.
I certainly could have changed the format, chosen more popular films, or made a host of alterations that allowed me to gain more visibility. Maybe they would have worked, maybe not. I refused. I could edit it more, make it more polished, less raw, less rough-around-the-edges. I refuse to do that as well.
Maybe I'm too stubborn. Maybe I like sabotaging myself. Or maybe I just fiercely believe in myself. It's easy to do that when you get applause and accolades. It's much harder when there is silence, obscurity, and hardly anyone cheering you on.
At some point, I decided that even if no one else is interested in my thoughts, I am. Even if no one cares about my life, I care about it. Even if no one thinks I matter, I do. Even if no one sees me, I will be my own witness.
To echo the words of the poet, Muriel Rukeyser, I am one woman telling the truth about my life. Nothing more and nothing less, but it is the most powerful thing a woman can do.
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
Source: Poets.org
"Mary's Eyes" by Tori Amos
Patterns matter
stringing sequences together matters
to bring
bring her back to us
the Death Midwife
can you bring her back to life