Window Seat, Womanhood, Final Craziness of my 100 Page Endeavor

Man. I mean, Woman!

I just saw Erykah Badu's Window Seat video. I have been stuck on that song for the past couple of weeks, and seeing the video only enhanced some of the sentiment I took from the song. I just got the sense that it was about freeing yourself and allowing yourself to be yourself, unencumbered by other people's judgment or expectations or demands. I feel like this is what it means to become your own woman. Heck, I just want a window seat... maybe an Amtrak window seat with laptop in tow, where I can write and listen to my i-tunes and watch the scenery shift and just do me!

Speaking of writing and being your own woman, my writing project explores identity through three lenses: girl, woman, and soul, and I've been encountering some difficulty on the Woman front.

I've been writing a lot recently about my girlhood in particular and girlhood generally, and that's been an interesting experience. I took myself back to elementary school, to first crushes, to my first racial awakening, to the little weird things I used to do as a child, to the things I remember about my mom and dad from when I was a little girl. It's been fun reacquainting myself with those parts of me that are still very much present, if subdued, in me.

I've also really enjoyed writing about self from the Soul perspective--what soul is from an artistic point of view as well as the spiritual perspective. There's a lot of room to explore here, lots of corners of myself that I haven't even come around to yet and this exploration of soul has nudged me into these spaces. And here is where I have really been able to meditate on humanity. I have come to very few deep profound insights, but it has been interesting work all the same.

Oddly it's the "woman" piece that has been really difficult for me. I keep running into the subject of love, which is perfectly appropriate in the sense that lots of women come into their identity as a woman when they experience their first love. But I don't want to dwell on that, and in fact I'm beginning to feel like I've hit a brick wall on the whole romantic love tip. I can pinpoint so many more experiences that have shaped and created my identity as a woman, from the difficult career choices I've had to make for myself as an adult, to losing my parents and being forced to understand myself not as anyone's child, but as my own. There's also just the experience of living in this body that reminds me every day that I am a woman--from the way we women have to take care of ourselves to the way we celebrate ourselves and express our femininity in how we walk, what we wear, etc.

So... as I march on through the final stretch of my 30 day, 100 page marathon, my plan is to focus on Woman, to really get into the heart of what I want to say in this section of the project. Wish me luck!

Thanks for reading.