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Aug 24, 2023

From Where Does a Woman Define Her Life Project?

August 29, 2023 by Pressenza Leave a Comment By Esther Amelia Delvenne “One discovers that one’s greatest destiny has to do with the meaning of life,which is from one towards others”. Silo The horizon

August 29, 2023 by Pressenza Leave a Comment

By Esther Amelia Delvenne

“One discovers that one’s greatest destiny has to do with the meaning of life,which is from one towards others”. Silo

The horizon of life is modified if there is a vital project, a profound purpose.

What do I mean by a vital project or a profound purpose? A profound project can be seen in women who have denaturalised their actions to become, today, transformers of life stories.

Any activity is not a project, it is found in the passing of life events.

When we do not have a project, we become vulnerable and dependent, then situations arise in which we are threatened, extorted, manipulated, or we feel a profound fear of what will happen to us if we do not respond in the way the patriarchal world intends.

The life project is an implosion that comes from the depths of your being, something you decide to do, regardless of everything around you. This can be artistic, political, social, religious, spiritual and/or scientific, etc. It would not have to be related to success and/or money, it does not bring us material benefits: it is not designed for that.

The patriarchal system designates only one life project for women: to be a wife and mother, or as I mentioned in previous articles, we are turned into “polyroles” of service and care tasks. Underneath and in the dark, we provide sexual services. If we want to change the course of history, we are bastardised by the patriarchal system and its main characters: husbands, boyfriends, fathers, bosses, partners, etc.

Can we identify the patriarchal models that shape our daily lives? We learn from childhood that, in order to be chosen, loved, to get work and especially a partner, we have to be other, to look like that unique model that is shown to us over and over again while we are invited to consume all kinds of things to stop being us. The daily expression of this invisible and historical machinery is evident in the everyday life of women, it is made flesh in the couples who convince us to carry out projects that only they are interested in; in the criticism of the life projects of women close to us; in the degrading of friends who choose to accompany projects that are not their own, etc. etc.

For these reasons, in addition to the degradations and criticisms they systematically receive, women do not realise their life projects. Due to the adaptation mechanisms by which we were raised and socially masked; we adapt ourselves to the demands of the environment: quiet, tidy and without shouting. We are functional, but “normalised” within a patriarchal system.

“That will never work, because you have based your life project on the project of the other, that is to objectify and objectify the other”².

At some point in our lives, tired and fed up with this model, something happens to us and we rebel against it all. From the profoundest depths of our being, what we always wanted to do is revealed almost magically. It can arise as a result of a personal crisis, from the recognition of our own failures, reflecting on the unfinished business that “life” didn’t let us do or simply because we felt like it.

How do we internally fracture ourselves by letting the patriarchal model design our life projects? How do we look for new models? Where is the focus from where I can transform my life?

When we find what our project is, we change our life completely because, also, this encounter implies that we can share it with others, that our fellow men and women are involved in this. By generating an introspective and reflective look, we can rework patriarchal forms that shape our links in everyday life. Our project becomes collective, not an individualistic act.

Besides, profound projects have no age, we don’t feel the advance of chronological time because we make a design, we develop it and we share it in the world.

Exasperated, like a storm that sweeps, with a quasi-subversive tenacity, like a wink of life, almost fictional, you go out into the world convinced that nothing will stop you now.

¹ https://mujeresquenofuerontapa.com/ Artivist and feminist project for social transformation with the aim of making visible the way in which mass culture reproduces and constructs gender stereotypes and mandates.² Silo, Collected Works Vol. I and II. Published 1998 by Editorial Magenta.

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Previously Published on pressenza with Creative Commons License

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Photo credit: Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash

Filed Under: Culture, Featured Content Tagged With: Esther Amelia Delvenne, gender, life, Pressenza, women