“We don’t need someone else to tell our story. We can tell it ourselves…more loudly, more accurately, and in a way that projects the truth. Our truth.”
Although it feels fresh, this is not new. People have been silenced and minimized since the beginning of time (I acknowledge we should have evolved more, but here we are).
It may be more overt, it may be louder, but it is not new, and being surprised by it only gives it power.
Sharing that story, the one where they erased us, that is not the story.
As Jewel, https://jeweljk.com sings in one of my most favorite songs, Life Uncommon:
“No longer lend your strength
To that which you wish
To be free from”
In my interpretation of her art, she is saying don’t waste your energy giving oxygen to the negative or the dismissal. In this case, use your voice and your talents to take one story that has been deleted and turn it into multiple published stories that will be documented and survive a .mil, a .gov, or a federal library controlled by politics.
Fill the space loudly. Celebrate the story that is missing or untold. Click, share, tag, like, and create.
Create the content, write the story, post, publish, and tell the story. Tell their story. Tell your story and engage.
Last December I took a trip to Egypt and found myself inspired by Hatshepsut. They tried to write her out of history.
She was the second queen to rule Egypt (1379 BC-1458 BC). She was forced to find her place on the trail in the Egyptian patriarchy. Although unorthodox to some, she took on traditionally male roles and physically masculine traits to include a fake beard.
I had the honor of visiting the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, https://egymonuments.gov.eg/ar/monuments/hatshepsut-temple
She was the OG influencer. There were many attempts to remove her work and legacy from Egyptian history. They destroyed her statues, defaced her monuments, and credited her achievements to male pharaohs. She had a very prosperous and peaceful reign. She re-established trade networks, funded missions, expeditions, and lead military campaigns.
She crashed through that stone ceiling, had a temple built in her name and a legacy that reminds us to #breaktrail.
I am sure it was exhausting, but here we are millenniums later visiting her temples, saying her name, and reminded that there is still work to do.
I shared that first picture of myself at the beginning of this post, because it no longer exists outside of my personal files. It was a speech I gave on Women’s Equality Day in 2020 at the United States Army Women’s Museum https://awm.army.mil. I like the picture, not only because of the topic but because of the nameless woman looking over my shoulder. I always assumed, at a glance, that it was someone famous, well known, who was watching me.
I asked a friend to stop by the museum and capture the name, sure I would be embarrassed that I couldn’t identify her on my own. My friend returned this picture:
I didn’t realize it was a mural and then she sent the description:
I was a bit surprised there was no name, but I assumed it would be easy enough to figure it out. Instead, I spent weeks researching only to find all sorts of assumptions and educated guesses as to who she might be, not in name but in action. She was his wife, their mother, and the laundress on “Suds Row.” She belonged to someone else.
Despite the fact she is nameless, this picture is quite famous as it covers journals, greeting cards, and postcards. There are a lot of people making money on the image of her commitment to our nation. She is symbolic in many ways.
But to me, her story illuminated something else. As a woman that enlisted as a Laundry and Bath Specialist in the United States Army, it was not lost on me that she was another example of a woman that had broken the trail before me at a time women served in other ways because of restrictions placed a woman’s service to our nation in uniform.
Her story matters to me, her name matters, and it deserves to be remembered. Her service deserves to be recognized and celebrated.
I do acknowledge that there is a vulnerability in storytelling, in publishing, in learning about those who walked the trail before us. It can be intimidating, especially writing about someone we have never met or even more so about ourselves. So don’t make them a stranger, get to know their story or pick someone you are closer to in your life-a mother, grandmother, friend, or yourself and share that story.
