As we celebrate International Women’s Day, what piece of the Glass Ceiling do you represent in the mosaic? What narrative has been assigned to your life? Are you a survivor… a healer … the victim… a student … an athlete … a creator … are you a motivator… dissenter … a protestor… or a uniter? And more importantly, is that narrative the one you want to weave through your personal story as you define yourself in our ever-evolving world?
The powerful shapes and colors of women who appear in our lives remind us of our own self-identity. Who we admire is who we can be, or not! Is it possible to have more than one identity? Can those identities intersect? … At what stage in life do we become comfortable with the answers? … And most organically … does our identity have value?
For many reasons, I would exhale and say, “YES!” Each of our identifying traits has value! We have value to our schools, our causes, our families and social networks, and most of all, value to ourselves. To claim one identity doesn’t mean we have to discard the others. We may not have fully grasped each of their individual nuances yet, but we are learning through our experiences. We are learning how to live our own stories until they become the DNA we recognize as our own. During the most challenging year of our lifetime, we have witnessed some of the most influential women shine their light for everyone to see, to rise up and not fall down…front-line workers, caregivers to the grieving, athletes, teachers, grocery workers, policewomen, journalists, and all those who kept us safe and sane. We are fragments of all those pieces that came crashing down in the old glass ceiling. Today, we are building new patterns with our identities; beautiful, unique, intelligent, and intrinsically more complex, to share with whoever dares to look up.
