Revolution from Within Author:Gloria Stein em Sometimes when I enter a familiar room or street, I think I see a past self walking toward me. She can't see me in the future, but I can see her very clearly. She runs past me, worried about being late for an appointment she doesn't want to go to. She sits at a restaurant table in tears of anger arguing with the wrong lover. She strides towa... more »rd me in the jeans and wine-red suede boots she wore for a decade, and I can remember the exact feel of those boots on my feet. She sits in a newspaper boardroom with the sort of powerful men who undermind her confidence the most, trying to persuade them to support a law that women badly need and fails. She's a ghost in the lobby of an office building that she and all the women of Ms. magazine walked through for so many years. She sushes toward me outside a lecture hall, talking, laughing, full of optimism.
I used to feel impatient with her: Why was she wasting time? Why was she with this man?at that appointment? forgetting to say the most important thing? Why wasn't she wiser, more productive, happier? But lataely, I've begun to feel a tgenderness, a welling of tears in the back of my throat, when I see her. I think: She's doing the best she can. Skhe's survived --and she's trying so hard. Sometimes, I wish I could to back and put my arms around her.....
We are so many selves. It's not just the lkong-ago child within us who needs tenerness and inclusion,but the perosn we were last year, wanted to be yesterday, tried to become in one job or in one winter, in one love affair or in one house where even now, we can close our eyes and smell the rooms.
What brings together these ever-shifting selves of infinite reactions and returnings is this: There is always one true inner voice.