If not me, then who?

Before calling myself an artist, I was an obstetric nurse. In that profession, I found the sacred in touch, in the ability to be with someone who suffers from the things of the flesh, in the strength of the body that generates life, in the silent power of women who go through childbirth. I deeply loved my work, but it was a constant dance of resistance against the hegemonic forces that want to control, tame, and define a woman's creative path through the objectification of the body and unnecessary interference in childbirth. I demanded of myself to provide good care, but I felt the insidious weight of institutional oppression.

Then, one day, I decided to step away from clinical, academic, and scientific practice to embark on a pilgrimage carrying the following question: “What else do I love to do, besides being a nurse, researcher, teacher?”—a kind of expedition that would require deeper investigation into art, mobilization, and listening to a more sensitive, less obvious, more hidden layer of my desire. I entered uncertain territory, where the risk of seeking meaning was greater, loneliness was denser, and grief was inevitable.

To this day, I wonder where I got the strength to take such a decisive leap... I had no idea how difficult the journey would be. I remember at that time I had a familiar impulsiveness and excitement, like a sensory memory of jumping into the deepest part of the pool from a diving board for the first time as a child. We know how to swim, but jumping from up there, falling to the bottom of that water, having to climb to the surface alone and swim to the edge on our own is quite an adventure. It was an impulse from a deeper place—something more ancestral that whispered that it was time to go with the flow of life, derailing the train, tearing up the map, following my intuition, my own “huevos".

“Freedom is not enough. What I desire still has no name.” I remember when I read that line by Clarice Lispector, as if in a meeting of great sisterhood, I knew where she had written it. A force, something unnameable but which contained the desire to experience, discover, unveil. It took me a while to face my own words, invent my own text, use my own metaphors to say what I think in an interesting way, since I put myself in a no place to say who I am. Motherhood certainly anchored this shift, but it didn't settle me for a second.

I had enormous resistance to writing. I grew up without confidence in the act of writing. As a child, my “diary” was stolen and read without my permission. This event invaded me and embarrassed me. I understood that it was better to keep things to myself. It was the same with my dancing. I value my privacy very much, existing in a time and space that is mine alone, which does not obey external logic. When writing returned as a daily activity, I once again experienced great anguish. I had the impression that once I started transcribing my stream of thoughts onto paper, I would no longer be able to stop. It would be an unrestrained movement where I could denounce and vociferate all the barbarities, violence, silencing, cowardice, injustices, abandonment, and humiliations that I had experienced and witnessed, and where I could redeem myself, narrate in words (because I already painted and already vented my need for self-expression there) my protagonism and my autonomous thinking.

“One is not born a woman: one becomes one.” I love this line because it reminds me to ask: What does it mean to be a woman? What defines me as a woman? Is being called female the same thing? Is it having a body with a uterus? Is it wearing skirts, high heels, colorful earrings, and lipstick? Simone de Beauvoir had a lot to say on this issue, pointing out in a way that had not been propagated until then that the idea of “woman” has been historically fabricated to be the “other” in binary culture, suggesting that a clear understanding of this opens up spaces for us to challenge ourselves in terms of autonomy, independence, and emancipation.

This phrase of hers resonates with me as an invitation—to (de)construct, to touch on the idea of imposed identities, to affirm one's own existence with lucidity. It is in this spirit that I understand what I have experienced so far: a continuous march of detachment and reinvention. Thanks to the company of women who have asserted themselves through their voices and knowledge, I do not feel totally alone. Each one, unraveling her own prohibitions, has found a way to craft her unique story.

I think of Elza Soares, with that raspy voice and indomitable strength, echoing the power to resist and shout: “I don't want to be the woman of the house, I want to be the woman of the world”—teaching me about the relationship between creation and the struggle for sovereignty and an act of self-love. Maya Angelou, courageous and sweet, says that persistence is a way to win: “We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated.” bell hooks expands on this vision and connects resistance to love, love for oneself, love for those who want individual/collective liberation and invent new ways to find communion. Lélia Gonzalez, in studying ancestry, the politics of the body, evokes for me the idea of creation as an active gesture of cultural revolution.

 In short, becoming a woman is not a path free from intense discomfort and exile. The world wants us to fit in, to remedy ourselves, to anesthetize ourselves with false solutions. The pressure is direct and indirect from all sides for us to be standardizable, predictable, transparent, and comparable. All of this entertains, distracts, and distances anyone from their creative, authorial, and authentic pulse...

Then Clarissa Pinkola Estés comes along and tells me about the wild fire, an aspect of the human psyche that, even when buried under normative rubble, never goes out. It stays there, like a small hidden ember. You need to blow on it hard to raise the flame and bring back the internal heat that warms the whole house.

I can't prove it, but I know that an ancestral rhythm dwells within me, an ancient force that gives me deep sustenance and insists that I take it slow. The warm facet of the desire for communion, which refuses domestication, which allows itself eccentricity, which allows itself to redefine notions of dependence/independence, which uses its own “ovaries” to continue creating even when invaded by doubts.

I know that following this fire means entering a deep aquatic underworld, where you cannot see with your eyes, where you need more imaginative and dreamlike artifacts to find answers and new paths to climb. It means participating in life with the feeling of being wonderfully insignificant. Looking at art, its symbols and representations as the great connector of individuals, subjectivities, and collectives. In these moments of putting on my seal skin and diving in, I honor these invisible companions. Sitting by the fire on the dark night of creative exile, I thank Clarice, Simone, Elza, Maya, bell, Lélia and Clarissa. Their words, their unique, authentic ways of talking about mundane, common things, their lives as a reference accompany me and challenge me to be faithful to my fire, the wisdom of my body, my cycles, and to trust my pulse.

And it is on this path, between movements and rests, that I find myself. In a kind of dancing hangover, experiencing the process of learning about my own rhythm, discovering other shapes and colors, softening my relationship with time — as part of a ritual of self-care. All these aspects that concern female existence embodied in practices of wisdom. All this that we all deserve, but that is not given to us lightly or passively — much less by right. All this that, if I don't grant it to myself... who will give it to me, right?