Barbara Philips - Oksford
Moderator 
ODE TO LETTING GO IN 2024
BARBARA PHILIPS
[571 words]
Barbara Philips është një grua e cila “lufton” nëpërmjet shkrimeve për drejtësinë sociale dhe shkrimtare e cila është botuar: në Herstry, New York Times, Southern Cultures, The Citron Review, 2023 Antology Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor dhe të tjerë. Ajo ka qenë avokate e të drejtave civile, Profesoreshë juridike dhe Oficere e programit të Fondacionit Ford, ajo jeton në Oksford, Misisipi dhe Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts.
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My girlfriends in Oxford, MS and I work out a lot of our lives over coffee. We’re all on this other side of 70 and have a lot of life to pick off the bones, chew on, and digest during our weekly morning gatherings.
Lately, we all admitted to feeling somekindaway about that unrelenting blizzard of women’s magazine articles and books raving about “reinvention”. Exhibit A, the sister in her 50s who leaves corporate America, whips up jams and jellies at her kitchen table, and now glows as a successful entrepreneur employing hundreds. Exhibit B, the sister who raised her children in the suburbs, but now spends her days in Atlanta making exquisite, exclusive and expensive pottery. Exhibit C, the sister who gives into her passion for dogs at age 60 and now is the
1 dog trainer in the country.
Marcia spoke for all of us when she put down her cup and remarked, “I’ve never seen any headline telling men to ‘reinvent’ themselves.” Those exhortations seem to us to have a heavy bass note of disapproval, of judgement, of criticism – that same bass note that sounds in the heads of many women condemning themselves for being too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too loud,
too quiet and… not enough.
The subtext of this “reinvention” culture has the same sort of disapproval as the phrase used by my Mother’s generation for a woman who at coffee hour after church clearly wasn’t keeping up with expectations. It was pathetic that she “just let herself go”. Those Spring Tea-pouring members of the Altar Guild at our Episcopal Church who dressed carefully each Sunday – meaning, among other things, constricted by a full girdle so that NOTHING moved – would lower their voices to say rather mournfully that the previously lovely member of the club who gained more weight than socially acceptable, showed up with less than a full face of make-up, her “outfit” not quite right, her hair not perfectly coifed, - had “let herself go”. A woman had to embrace all the restrictions, constrictions, social expectations of every sort. Letting herself ”go” made a woman an object of both judgment and pity.
Now that I’m on the other side of 70, I take on “let herself go” as a call to liberation freeing us from those old expectations and these new ones dressed up as “reinvention”. Time for a new interpretation. First. The woman herself has the power. It is she who decides. She is the actor, not the one to whom something is done. Second. The woman herself “lets herself” – gives herself permission. Third. The woman gives herself permission to “go”. “GO!” She gives herself permission to be free of the premier rules of social expectations – the rules regulating how she looks and what she does. And, having thrown those regulations out the window, she becomes a dangerous woman. Who knows what she might do next?
So, to all of us who discovered the joy of “Day Pajamas” during the COVID pandemic, who still haven’t put on a full-face of makeup, who dispensed with the weekly manicure and miraculously survived, who used COVID-Time to get to know one’s self better and to nurture yourself – we hope 2024 is the year you give in more fully to being yourself. We all lifted our cups of coffee to toast the exhortation we’ve adopted to replace “reinvention” - “Let yourself go!”
Preparated: Angela Kosta Collaborator on the Orfeu.al website and Prestigjioze Orfeu Magazine.
