I Believe

(this has a lot of references to religion and spirituality. if you think religion is stupid, you don't have to read this post. there's really nothing scholarly or academic or critical in here, just me realizing something about how and why I became a feminist)

I have a Pagan spiritual identity, and gender equality is a big part of that faith. Another part is the belief in the idea in fate, or the idea that a higher power has a hand in acts of chance.

Sometimes, like now during midterm season, I feel hopeless. I feel like the dumbest, most incompetent student in my classes, with no real future in what I'm studying. Then I realize, perhaps it was a higher power that led me here.

The personal is political, and I believe that a higher power allowed many personal events to happen not to torture or punish me, but to open my eyes and inspire me to fight. Somehow.

Maybe it's not poor decision-making that led me to date all those douchebags. Not only could it have been a way for me to find the one who is actually meant for me, but perhaps the gods sent them to me, and me to them, so that I may learn the dark side of sex and relationships, and learn firsthand the awful ways in which women are still being treated by men. I was to learn that relationship abuse is not a series of isolated incidents, but a gendered behavior pattern ingrained in society and interlaced with the patriarchy that still exists whether we want to admit it or not.

Maybe it was an act of fate that led me to Joe, who showed me the Foamy cartoons, which featured a gothic feminist character named Germaine, whom I'm beginning to realize was another one of the big reasons why I became a feminist at such a young age.

Maybe it as another act of fate that had me placed in Mr. Shuman's junior year US History class, where I began to realize my passion for politics, especially laws and public policy matters relating to the public interest. That class is why I'm here, studying politics and wanting to one day run for office, though people laugh at me.

Sometimes I think there's no way I can succeed in what I want to do. But then I realize that the gods would not have led me here if I didn't have the strength and the intelligence to succeed in the field I was inspired to study through a series of events I can only attribute to fate, and to following my instincts in many occasions. Perhaps by being a student of politics, sociology, gender studies, and possibly law someday, I am training to serve a higher power as well as the general public.