A Life of Passion...and of principle

As I began to seek inspiration for this piece, I looked back at the writing sample I had prepared for my internship application to the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta. The prompt—why do you want to work for the Feminist Women’s Health Center?—had stumped me and I had struggled through draft after draft of hollow-sounding essays. I had hundreds of reasons I wanted the internship, but no unifying thread amongst them.

A few weeks ago, I was handed a sheet I had written back in September about my goals for college. I was shocked to find women’s rights written all over it. All semester, I had agonized over whether or not to focus on women’s rights and women’s studies instead of medicine and public health. I had become so focused and entrenched in the idea that I was to pursue a career in global health and infectious disease that I had failed to recognize my obvious interest in women’s issues. In fact, over the course of the semester I had found that I was passionate about women’s rights (really in civil and personal rights in general, which I like to view collectively as human rights, though many people would fight me on it). My passion had terrified me, because it threatened to disrupt my plans. Now I recognize that it is perhaps the plans I should have been wary of, as they got in the way of my passion.

Over Winter Break, I had begun reading my Women’s Studies textbook as a way to ward off my weariness of being home. One of the first pieces I read was Adrienne Rich’s 1977 commencement address at Rutgers University’s Douglass College (the women’s college), entitled “Claiming an Education.” In it, Rich berates young women for thinking of college merely as a place one goes to “receive” an education rather than a place in which one fights to “claim” one. She notes that “the difference in that is between acting and being acted-upon, and for women it can literally mean the difference between life and death.”

As this semester closes, I’ve made a pact with myself to live my life actively, not passively. To me, being a principled person is about living truthfully—whether that truth is ultimately subjective or objective is beyond the point. Being a principled person is about recognizing that you have a responsibility to be honest with yourself and others on all fronts, and understanding that honesty is not as simple as deciding to admit you to your parent that you ate that one extra cookie that they told you not to eat because it would ruin your appetite for dinner. It’s about having academic integrity and doing the work necessary to earn the grade you want, rather than copying someone else’s paper or exam. It’s about admitting to an intimate partner that things aren’t working out in spite of both of your best efforts, and being truthful as to the reasons why. It’s about standing up for what you believe is right and refusing to sit down because you are told to do so, or because you are standing alone, or because sitting down is easier than continuing to stand. It’s about admitting to yourself that you are passionate about something, no matter what others may think of you for it. In the words of Adrienne Rich, it is about refusing to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict or confrontation. For “the difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”

After reflecting upon all of this, I returned to my internship application essay and began anew. I wrote not of what the Center offered and what each of those offerings meant to me. Instead, I wrote a different kind of piece. A hard piece. A personal piece. A brutally honest piece. I wrote of my fury at being told my passion was women’s rights and not medicine. I wrote of my fear of letting go of the life plan I had clung to so dearly. I wrote of realizing what Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre had said so many years ago—“I have an inward treasure born within me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

In 1994, Lisa Marie Hogeland wrote an essay entitled “Fear of Feminism: Why Young Women Get the Willies,” which in many ways forms a response to the challenge Adrienne Rich posed to young women in 1977—or at least, a response to young women’s refusal to heed Rich’s call. “Fear of feminism,” she writes “is not a fear of gender, but rather a fear of politics. Fear of politics can be understood as a fear of living in consequences, a fear of reprisals.” So too, then, fear of living a life with principle. We cannot call ourselves principled people and yet stand idly by in the face of inequity and blatant wrong-doing, under the pretense that it is not affecting us or that the wrongs being committed are not so great. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bound.” Similarly, anyone who lives on this earth can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bound. Therefore, we owe it to ourselves and others to ensure that all people are treated with the utmost respect and compassion—not because they are our intellectual or social “equals,” or because they are “less fortunate” than we are, or because they have something that might someday benefit us, but because of our shared humanity.

Being a principled person is hard, no one would deny that. Much as with feminism, “once you have your ‘click!’ moment, the world shifts, and it shifts in some terrifying ways" (Hogeson). Once we recognize systems of inequality and oppression we are forced to choose between challenging them and becoming passively complicit in their operation. Being a principled person demands refusing to see this as a choice, in spite of the heavy societal or personal consequences we may face as a result of challenging the status quo. It demands “courage, intelligence, boldness, sensitivity, rationality, complexity, a sense of purpose, and, lest we forget, a sense of humor as well” (Hogeson). Yet being a principled person simultaneously offers us the greatest treasure in life—the knowledge that we have staked a claim to life, that we have lived every moment of our lives with passion and integrity, that we have truly done something to justify our existence. Being a principled person is the hardest thing we will ever do, but every moment lived as a person of principle is a vote of confidence in the human race and a shared commitment toward a world in which the inborn potentialities of any and every person will never be wasted, raveled-away, paralyzed or denied.