There are plenty of attempts to translate this beautifully simple song into English, but it is absolutely impossible to convey all the spirit in it... which means that I really must try. :-)
Here goes:
"
If ever anyone, asks about me...
Tell'em that I lived to love you.
Before you, I have merely existed
tired and without anything to give.
My dear, listen to my prayers
I ask that you return, that you again want me
I know one can't love on one's little own
Maybe, very slowly, you can again learn to
My dear, listen to my prayers
I ask that you return, that you again want me
I know one can't love on one's little own
Maybe, very slowly, you can again learn to
If your heart won't want to give in
Won't feel the passion, won't want to suffer
Without making plans for what's to come
My heart could love for the both
"
Amar pelos dois - Salvador Sobral, Eurovision 2017
This might come to a shock to many, but I am a woman.
I was fortunate enough to never feel like that meant much, though I never felt any different or question my gender. I just never believed that being a woman entailed more than being a person that holds the potential to eventually bare children.
Although nowadays I fear the concept of tomboy or tomgirl might offend many, due to the lack of a simpler way to express what I mean to say, allow me to use these terms as their definitions allow. Not going into the detail of who does the considering
or what typical means, for argument sake admit that there is an
underlying and statistically endorsed general consideration that, associated to ones
culture, attributes characteristics to define the "typical girl" and the "typical boy" and that tomboy is thus a girl that exhibits characteristics or behaviors considered typical of a boy. Full disclosure: I was graced with a tomboy spirit and never felt the pressure to be any different, probably because my mother was already a great athletic tomboy and my father.. Well, he married my mother, so I guess of all the ladies he could have tried to pick he rushed to close the deal with the lady that made him warmer and cozier inside and that was a tomboy girl. My mother sisters and cousins were all female and all were clear tomboys. This means that in my family tomboy behavior was actually valued. Independently of our gender we all came out with a high athletic prowess, incredible sensitivity for words and arts in general and good abstraction and logical thinking. I always took my upbringing for granted, considering that I was born to a family in sufficient financial well-being that nothing ever missed on the table or school ground, but looking back I realize that I was blessed so much more than that. My great-aunt was a woman that studied while caring for her younger sisters because her mother was ill and ended up with a maths degree giving high-school classes, divorced from a cheating husband and absolutely selfsuficient. That is a woman that blew over 95 candles and still has a wit to shame me. Most of the women in my family ended up in science. My grandmother was never that good with maths, she was a stay-home woman that took care of the household until she embodied the emancipation. She studied after her children were razed with little opposition from her husband that missed the "real cooking" but knew better than to try and stop her. By the time she was able to retire she took a master in "woman condition"she wasn't a brilliant study, but she had a shy strength that sounded like "why not me too?". This way, since very young I learned that there was no underlying reason why being a woman meant more than that you had some reproductive organs that aren't always nice to handle. Nowadays I know mine was a very limited and fortunate view of life.
A phd, a baby and a husband later I can say that looking at statistics and reports I now understand that not all women got the chance to fulfill their true potential, many due to some cultural pressure even within my own culture, other due to unequal funding. It saddens me to know that little girls can't imagine themselves following courses that they get inspired by because they are told that they wouldn't be successful "because it is not a subject/job for a girl".
Worst than that, I fear that this is only perpetuated by the confused and mishandled media movement that assaults the concept of gender equality. There is no such thing as gender equality, by definition genders are different, that is why we came up with the genders, to mention the difference between humans in two kinds.
There should nevertheless be gender equity! I am all for it, but how do we get it? Assuming that what we need is to force science down little girls throats or that little boys should be forced to play with dolls is absurd and treating equally inherently different individuals equally will only result in more differentiation.
Studies show the impact of hormones on our career choices, career according to hormones. There is also no doubt that hormones control our brain functions: "Verbal memory scores are frequently used as one measure of higher level cognition. These scores vary in direct proportion to estrogen levels throughout the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause" -Estrogen wikipedia; "There are some differences between a male and female brain (possibly the
result of different testosterone levels), one of them being size: the
male human brain is, on average, larger. ... Attention, memory, and spatial ability are key cognitive functions affected by testosterone in humans." -Testosterone wikipedia. Now as all men like to point out, size is not always a good measure. And for a great investigative journalism on the subject watch: The gender equality pradox - documentary NRK - 2011
where you can easily get the idea that the social movement is guiding and creating biased on the undeniable truth, men and women are on average different.
Women can have their brains wired differently because biologically they were selected to perform different tasks, does that makes them dumber? Well, maybe? Now, before you rage out of this blog understand that language was developed in this patriarchy that has since been progressing into what we now know as modern society. Although we attacked the concept that only males can be clever, wasn't the measure of cleverness devised based in men abilities, by men and to measure men for men jobs? Couldn't it be that this new emotional coefficient helps complement the previous idea that cleverness was limited to the intelligence coefficient?
It all boils down to statistics, the numbers that don't lie, the data, the science, the undeniably reliable source of probing reality. Does anyone doubt that although you can define very accurately the average woman there probably isn't such a being? Statistics my friends was developed to use in bulk, to predict, and see traces in the many, but fails miserably to define or predict the singular. Are you sure that given any woman she will be more likely to be alike her sister than her brother? Can you not think of cases where that isn't true? Then fighting any statistics that prove men to be different from women, which is to be rationally expected since we are biologically different, is not only illogical but a perversion of science. Then why are we so concerned about the amount of women in science or engineering? -women scientific researchwomen in science
Shouldn't we rather be concerned about the fact that socially we have created a higher relevance to all men-prone jobs and discredit the importance of women-prone jobs. Why is the kindergarten teacher, that possibly has more influence in designing our future societies, less relevant in our culture than the engineer that helps design the landscape? Why are nurses considered less important, when they have such an impact on patient recovery, than the doctor, that might be replaced by an artificial intelligence with access to an inhuman size database (comment). Why did career women look down on stay home mothers or women that hanged their career for few years to attend closer to their children? Why do we make it sound like only maths and science is a smart subject, when psychologists that aren't extremely smart aren't only useless but harmful?
Maybe, this "woman's day", instead of praising the women that less look "like women" to you, praise the diversity that makes each woman and man unique. Instead of parsing equality that is imposed forcefully and unnaturally on society, praise equity that allows minorities to feel welcomed and secure where they are valuable for their diversity contribution. Praise mothers for being mothers and fathers for being fathers, teachers for teaching, nurses for nursing, lawyers for defending and accusing, doctors for researching and devoting, and society for learning to adapt to the human concept that has evolved so much since my great-aunt's time. Embrace a new era in which we no longer need to fight tradition for the sake of breaking momentum. Instead of steering boys and girls to behave accordingly because it is tradition, or to behave the same because it is the new fashion, one can nurture their curiosity to explore what they like and allow people to fall in love by professions that fit them best, whether that means equal statistics or not, whether that means being a minority and learning about your own uniqueness.
From a place of absolute freedom, because I know that I was free to be as pink as I'd like -I did have that phase- and I was free to dream of becoming a painter, then a dance, then a physicist and then an engineer and finally managed to follow through on the last two:
"I have a dream, that one day every person will feel free to explore and define his/hers own self and thus contribute more efficiently to society."
I am sure of only one thing, that everyone experiences feelings and in particular pain for different reasons in their own peculiar ways. I won't try to pretend to know what happens inside others bodies or what crosses their minds. I can only explore my own pain and hope that understanding it will shed light to people feeling it themselves or to those closest to them.
I want to start by making it very clear that I love my life, I have been too lucky too often and would not switch with anyone else's and yet I considered only too often to part from it.
In my understanding there are two types of people, those that are consistent that they exist and therefore deserve a shot at being happy and those that are constantly wondering if they deserve all they have been given be that what may. I would never correlate this distinction to their altruistic or good nature nor their common sense.
The first won't often wonder whether they should be alive. They don't understand that need, they are alive and nothing you can say could make such a question less nonsensical. They expect that life is to be cherished and lived to the fullest of their abilities. Their most common question seems to be what can I do to improve life, mine and that of those around me. Their understanding of the question "should I be alive?" is reserved for extreme cases of pain, when life has nothing to offer and nothing to live for.
The latter, as you may well expect by now, will constantly consider "should I be alive?" in other words whether they are consuming resources that would be better spent on someone else. This is a strange concept I know, for the first type of people, but the question sums up to whether another would have taken better choices and be a better son/daughter or husband/wife or father/son. Mostly the question ends up in "would the world be a better place without me in it"?
I started wondering if my family would be better of without me when I was 5, first time I decided to run away from home. I don't remember it well. I do remember very well though by the age of 10 when I decided again to leave home. At that time I didn't have much common sense, if I ever got any, I just ran. I was enraged, I was panting and frustrated and I couldn't even understand what was coming over me. I was violent and afraid, my thoughts were all over the place and I couldn't seem to calm down. The view helped. I had this place close to the drive way, a large open field that I used to use to run with my dog every morning. My dog had died and I hadn't been there for what felt like to long. I guess it made sense that my feet took me there although I couldn't remember deciding it or anything else that leaving for that matter. It was cold, but not too much and it wasn't raining nor was the floor wet, there were no large piles of leaves from the trees that spread erratically through the field, which means that it was probably spring time. I had had a major fight with my mother who I loved, and I felt awful. I found a place close to the moving cars that was shielded by a large enough bush that I could sit behind. The sound of the cars helped. The coverage of the bush too. I couldn't cry, until I could and then I cried like I had just murdered someone. I revisited what happened, which was so meaningful I couldn't tell you today, 20 years later. I know I didn't fell like I had to change, or improve, I felt like it was something about who I was and how I was incapable of hurting someone even as close as my mother or sister, even with as much love as I had for them. I felt selfish so it all probably started with me not willing to borrow something to my sister, my father stepping in to force the good sisterhood in me and me reacting in plain fury. Time passed and I ran through my problem, I broke it down to myself. Then I focused on options, but I could find none. I was not autonomous and had no money, there was no place I could get a job at that age, and I was not prepared to go hungry and die. I considered crossing the street, and getting hit by a car, they were passing so fast, so close, and they wouldn't have time to see me since it was night and I was just jumping from behind a bush that covered me well. I thought that I could kill someone, and that is no way to end my life. I would at least break some innocent person's car and leave them thinking they were responsible for my decease which was unfair. I considered going to my grandparents house, they would love to heroically take me in and save me from my parents, but my parents weren't bad parents and they didn't deserve that sort of pain. The whole idea was to spear them more hurt and they had enough bad blood with my grandparents without me pulling this one on them. So I went back home. My mother pretended not to be too worried or mad, and just tried to calmly say that it was not alright for me to run off like that and I too pretended it was no big deal. That is the first time I remember thinking of shutting my eyes completely for good. Since then, many times over I considered it. Not because my life was unbearable but because my pain was. Over the years I came to recognize this anxiety that takes over you and the despair afterwards, the feeling worthless and a guilt thereafter. I don't control my temper too often and many times my feelings of guilt are related. Sometimes I notice that the immense pain comes first it takes a hold of my heart and doesn't seem to let go. My patience is then reduced and I am bound to pick up a fight and feel worthless again and feel this all too familiar feeling that it could all end, the pain, the strain of trying to be better at every turn, the despair of not being a better person, the guilt of hurting those I love. Last time I felt it I cryied myself to sleep next to my beloved husband and I had no reason what so ever, not a real one. I could feel my brain searching for a reason to make sense of it, something to fill guilty for, something to explain this angst. I had years before noticed that all these episodes do happen within a certain cycle of the month and that I was brought down to this abyss of internal pain by biology. Not the hormones alone. The same way it is not reasonable to question the sanity of a woman that screams for something she asked you thousands of times not to do, just because she has her period. Biology just gets you in a lower starting point, on a higher nerve frenzy and closer to pop. I know the pain can feel so real that even having noticed the biology contribution and rationally sensing my brain fighting to make sense I went through my options. Pills, jumping, scenarios... having many options and none immediate helped. Mostly I felt like anyone else could become a better wife, and that my family would be better of without the disappointment and heart break I bring. I can honestly say I felt this, and I can honestly say that rationally there is no reason for me to be such a logical disappointment to anyone. Some people just have this internal dialog on pause in their head, it is destructive, it is impulsive and it sneaks up on you at any time you go a bit lower. These latter people gain a lot having someone or something depending on them, they want to be part of something bigger that relies on them and justify the oxygen they steal from unborn innocent futures full of potential. I haven't had such a feeling since my son was born, and I am certain it is because he needs me so that it can't cross my mind not being here for him. I wonder what I'll have when he reaches 21 and my husband is naturally exhausted of loving me to his fullest and with all my crazy.
I am sorry if I scared anyone reading, and hope this story helps someone needing answers that the self can't sometimes find. I felt many times that it is usually because it is intrinsic to us, our way of thinking and our biology that we can't make sense of it. It is so incrusted in who we are that we can't probe and have a hard time externalize. I believe also that trying to externalize this phantom pain and hollowness that leads some people to hurt themselves.
