Heartland: Turning Pain into Power

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A little further along was the activist lounge, filled with tables of information on projects in New Orleans and around the world. Smart, creative, passionate initiatives that turned pain into power through safe houses and schools, policy advocacy and economic entrepreneurship. There were group art projects and book signings and lots of conversation. Wandering among us were the speakers, performers, and star-studded casts from the evening performances of The Vagina Monologues and a new play, Swimming Upstream, created by and based on the experiences of New Orleans women.

On the plane home, I read Ensler’s book Insecure at Last: A Political Memoir. In it I found the unifying theme I had been sensing at the gathering but hadn’t been able to articulate to myself. It is our quest for security, on every level, that perpetuates cruelty and violence—from the judgment and hate women hurl upon their bodies to the pathological need for control that fuels greed, rape, and war.

Ensler says of herself, “I sometimes have anxiety. I have bouts of terrible low self-esteem. I feel lonely on occasion, but mainly I feel alive, free. I feel myself.” She proposes “that we consider what would happen if security were not the point of our existence. . . . Freedom can come only from contemplating death, not from pretending it doesn’t exist. Not from running from loss, but from entering grief, surrendering to sorrow.”

For those of us who have never experienced anything remotely akin to the suffering of those who courageously shared their stories in the Superdome, our dark nights of the soul feel petty, useless, and self-absorbed. But they too are the by-products of the insecurity that propels the horrors of this world. We only come to peace with insecurity by acknowledging and shining the light of awareness on the darkness within each of us, by making ourselves matter, too. That’s where we begin to turn pain into power and, at peace with being insecure, can begin to make peace in an insecure world.

Nina Rothschild Utne is Utne Reader’s editor at large.

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