From the Vagina Monologues to Mass Marketing: Healing These Wounds that Hold Us Together By: Tess Farnham- MetroEast NEWS December 14, 2011 Much to the chagrin of a strict and Puritanical Catholic school upbringing, and with no apologies whatsoever to Sister Madeline, the nun who educated my third grade class on the horrors of war, but also ironically taught us to accept the shame that follows “attention-seeking” episodes of histrionic post traumatic distress, here I sit at this desk composing a post on a topic I can’t even say without having to put a hand over my mouth and mumble . And in the interest of helping you understand why I chose to do such a thing, especially with someone like the ghost of Sister Madeline looking so disappovingly over my shoulder, I will first explain that I was never really one to surrender to the conventions of conformity. And by this I don’t mean to say I actually chose the path less traveled. . .instead I am saying that I more or less had noplace else to go. And so consequently, and despite everyone’s best efforts to mold me into someone who looks and behaves like this:
I ended up a person who makes art that looks like this:
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And tragically somehow, I suppose you could say I seem to have managed to evolve into this embarrassingly unquiet person who writes and makes art about taboos, ones including but not exclusively limited to: mental illness, feminism, sexuality. . . and as I type, the one thought I have spinning upstairs in the lost attic of my brain is,
“Oh, man my priest is gonna kill me in the confessional with a buttload of puragatorial “Hail Mary„s” if he ever finds out.” I felt the same way about my seventh grade journal though. The one I kept under lock and key. And in admitting this, I am not really looking to cast aspersions on any of our formative oppressors; it doesn’t help anyway. . . just leads to more defensive arguments about how we need to do as we are told and soldier on. Besides, we are people whose ancestors were schooled by the Great Depression, persecution, what have you.