Before telling you more about Feminist Futures, I thought it would be a good idea to start by telling you first about myself and why I am doing Feminist Futures. From personal experience, I can say things have a greater chance to prosper when they are built on strong foundations. Feminist Futures is an authentic expression of my Soul.
My name is Thays and I was born a storyteller.
I said my first words at the age of 10 months and at 1 year old, I was already reciting short poems and prayers taught by my mother and aunts.
I was lucky enough to be the daughter of two storytellers with very different and complementary styles. My mother used to read me stories before going to bed, whereas my father was more about telling stories he had learned from his childhood, only with the care of changing the tragic into happy endings. Both were quite theatrical in their storytelling.
I remember telling stories out loud to my dolls and getting lost in my vast imagination. When I was 5, I let my baby little sister fall from the bed because, instead of watching her, I began to imagine a story and perform it with my dress ribbon. I got teleported back into that room by her scream. Luckily, she was well.
At the age of 7, my mother helped me write a story about a circus in town, and I remember stating very clearly that I would like to be a writer when I grew up. I always find it fascinating how much children know about themselves before they get conditioned by the world's expectations.
At 11, a Portuguese teacher asked us to write a journal as one of our yearly assignments. I love it so much, I never stopped. I have a huge and heavy suitcase full of them in awful handwriting. A computer will never be as comforting as a good piece (peace) of paper.
Writing saved my life despite family dysfunction, depression, and abuse. Telling myself stories about dreamed futures created strong magnetic fields towards them at the odds of high levels of anxiety, codependency and confusion.
Even having studied Journalism and Screenwriting, and told numerous stories in various formats and mediums, I was very unaware of storytelling being my very reason for Being.
But one day, after I turned 30 and was doing my Masters in Gender Studies in London, one of those days where only writing could calm me down, in cathartic writing, pages after pages, I wrote: "Before anything else, I am a storyteller". My Soul was revealing herself to me.
One year or so later, I was facilitating digital storytelling workshops for adolescent girls in Rio. Now that I was a conscious storyteller, it was time to hold spaces for other women and girls to tell their own stories, together.
I don't know if you ever experienced the power of safe, feminist spaces for stories to emerge. Untold stories, unheard stories, stories of deep wounds and trauma. At first, my commitments were to (i) hold the space for deep collective listening; (ii) set wise boundaries so the trauma of one girl was not transformed into a trigger for the rest of the group; (iii) not end the workshop until every girl had finished their story, so they could leave with a sense of completion and the understanding that no matter what happened, they were much more than their stories.
However, I was the one beginning to feel incomplete with those workshops. Something was missing. And again, it was time for my Soul to show me the next step.
To help the girls tell their stories, I used to guide a visualization where they would go on a magical boat to revisit the river of their lives and identify key moments that led them to their present moment. Maybe there was a whirlpool at some point, a rock that changed the course of the river, someone who helped them paddle, or a day of blue sky and calm waters. And one day, as I was guiding them to approach the margin of the river, so they could take off the boat and take their attention back into the room, I first invited them to look to the other side of the river - to the future. Where the course of the river was still in creation, and they could be the captains of their boats and choose their destination, despite not having full control of the waters.
I was not planning on saying that, but my intuition said it through me, out loud, so I could realize the future was the missing piece. After that, life began to send my way several future-related tools, events, and courses. And I discovered in futures methods not only a source of hope and empowerment, but also a great deal of joy.
Feminist Futures is an expression of my past-present-future river of life.
댓글