Scraping the Foundations

I started with the cabinet in my bathroom. I went through my house, methodically and slowly. Room by room, drawer by drawer, thing by thing. And I got rid of everything I could; all the expired goods, the unworn clothes, the unread books. All the unnecessary furniture, the well-intentioned gifts, the once-critical collectibles. Stuck in a darker place than I have been in a long time, I was at a loss on how to manage my days. So I cleaned.

I didn’t know if it was to prepare to move or to prepare a new work surface for living. I thought about calling my mom to tell her I was considering moving back home. But then I thought I couldn’t take her relentless optimism about my life here.

I worked my way into a closet and the phone rang. Naturally, it was her.

“Guess what I grabbed from the old house last week,” she gushed.

We’d just shut down and sold her house of ten years. We’d spent an afternoon tersly shoving boxes at each other, crying for the past – and crying we were laughing so hard reading my sister’s first grade stories and plays. I read them aloud in her phonetic seven-year old spelling and sounded like Borat.

Like me, my sister came to her writing early, left it and only came back to it recently.

“I didn’t think we were both allowed to be writers and that was your thing. Our brother did art so I couldn’t do that,” she’d explained.

“So you became a dancer instead,” I concluded. I understood how she felt. After a thirteen-year swim career, I’d quit the team when her times got too close to mine. We both agreed we couldn’t be great in the same arena.

We’d both been infected by that thinking for far too long. Now with me talking of leaving LA, she wonders what will become of our sitcom we are developing together. I think maybe it’s time for me to step aside for her to be the writer now. After all, I came here because I wanted to be able to say I’d given it a shot. I didn’t want to go on living a small life and wondering what might have been if I’d only tried. Well, I’ve given it a shot and it hasn’t turned out. So far.

Then - back to scene - I’m sorting my closet and mom calls.

I tell her, yes, I know she saved some of my sister’s elementary school writing from the trash heap. The stuff we’d been reading and laughing about.

“No, no. Well, yes. But there was yours too.”

I haven’t told her about my current personal distress, what I am considering or what I’m in the middle of doing.

“You know what? You’ve got to never give up on your writing. Listen to this…” and she proceeds to read me my elementary school teachers’ comments on various stories I’d written. “Heidi, even then…” She concludes.

How does she do that? She doesn’t read my blog. She hadn’t talked to my sister. She had in no way been told that I was rifling through my belongings considering chucking this whole Tinseltown life and moving home where life would be “easier.” Yet here she was, answering the unasked question. Like a perfect Act Two turning point. Just when you thought all was lost for our heroine…

OK so it’s cheesy and overly sentimental. But so like life. And movies.

I grunt but otherwise don’t really acknowledge what she’s said.

“What are you up to?”

“Cleaning…” I find a stash of mittens. I’d need these back home in the mountains.

“Oh. Well I just thought you’d want to remember what Mrs. Walsh said about your writing when you were eight. I’m so glad you’re out there, honey. It’s meant to be and it was from first grade.”

My mother, the deus ex machina.

I can’t say my faith is restored but I do know that sometimes you’ve got to go on other people’s perceptions of you when your own becomes dimmed. So for now, I’m just holding onto the fact that I don’t want to have to wear mittens in May. At least not this year.

Gratitude

When you get down to point zero and are finally without ego, open, defenseless, help comes in different and sometimes unexpected forms. I've noticed even in good times that when I take a moment out of the frenetics to stop, center myself and say "thank you," I can physically feel a shift - an easing - in my body.

Thank you for all the support, comments and concern. I have been touched by the offers of job help, connection help, and sympathetic ear help.

One form help took was the loan of a book called "The Cancer Monologue Project" from a good friend. I was reading it yesterday as I try to process my thoughts and feelings about my friend who has cancer and this quote smacked me in the center of my chest:

When you come to the edge of all that you know,
You must believe in one of two things,
There will earth upon which to stand
or you will be given wings

-Author Unknown

Cracks in the Facade

I am the first to admit I can come off as a Pollyanna. Especially with my consistently blithe outlook on life in LA and a Hollywood career. I've had my share of off days but I've never really lost hope. Brazen and sure of my talent I marched into the Tinseltown battle. Lately though, things seem to have hit a turning point in several ways.

Last week while home, I visited a friend whose been battling various cancers for nearly a decade. There's no one taking care of him. That's not sitting well with me. As I contemplate the possibility of moving home to care for him, I'm forced to assess what I'd be giving up. The answer was a sad "not much."

This summer I will hit my five-year mark. I have created a great network of people and have done some great writing. I have work ready to sell. Heck, I've even produced a feature... which needs distribution.

For the most part though, I still mostly grocery shop at the 99cent store and am barely able to claw out an existence here. I'm getting tired. In the grand scheme, no one who could really pay me for the work I've done, or hire me to do more of it, knows about me. I am at a loss as to how to change that.

And five years already. When does non-success become pathetic? Ten years? Twenty? Or was it at three?

I can finally turn around and look at myself as I was when I moved here so full of audacious hope. I see what they saw - those cynical veterans of the Hollywood trenches. I know why they laughed.

I feel like I've fought the good fight to reach this point. What happens next will determine if it becomes a might-have-been story or a snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat story. Either an angel connector will reach out a helping hand or there will be a sign from the Universe to pack it in and go home. Tonight, all I really know is I'm tired of fighting.

Cosmos

“Billions and billions and billions of stars…”

Carl Sagan’s oddly comforting voice introduced his weekly PBS show. I sat watching with my step father. Sometimes it was boring to me. I was more excited about Knight Rider coming on later that night. But I sensed that it was important to watch if it was something John valued. I sat and we traveled through the stars.

The unseasonably cold wind whips a snowflake across my cheek and I snap back to the present. John’s been dead for ten years. I’m standing in our old drive-way as my mother, sister and I pack up the house we’ve been renting out to a stranger for the last five years.

John’s old hardcover copy of “Cosmos” sits on the garage sale table and I keep staring at it. I have been pushing my mother hard all morning to let go of things. Stop hording and move on. It’s just stuff. I’m wondering if I should grab the book.

I can remember it as far back as I remember John. It sat on the top tier of the built-in book shelves by his desk. “Cosmos” was part of the set of the movie of my life as long as it took place in that house.

It sat there as John taught me how to draw and write. It was there when my sister and I made up silly games running back and forth in front of the shelves. It witnessed the arguments, the nights John slept on the couch in front of the shelves. It saw me and Ted pretend to fall asleep on the couch so we could spend the night together without admitting we actually liked each other.

“Do you remember dad always watching this show?” I ask my sister as I cradle the book in my arms. I remember how fiercely we fought over his stuff when he died. A part of me wants her to fight me for this. I want this object to matter.

She grunts vaguely and continues sorting stuff. Granted the book was on a high shelf back then and she was much shorter. It’s a big, heavy book. I put it back on the sale table as neighbors and sale-cruisers mill around.

John’s “Cosmos” doesn’t sell. The sale pile becomes the Goodwill pile - except not really for Goodwill. For the Vietnam Vets Association since John was one. We are locking up the house to leave it for the last time. The house sale closes tomorrow and we won’t come back here again. The garbage truck will take what’s left tomorrow.

Will I regret not taking this book with me? I stare at it for a long minute. Then I close the garage. I continue to think about the book with its tattered cover as I fly home, back to the sun. I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. It was John’s after all. I imagine it being chucked into the donations truck with all our other old left-behind things. Things that used to matter to one or another of us.

I get home and sit with the books of John’s that I do have. The ones I took when we divided his stuff up after his death ten years ago. I wonder why my sister and I fought over some of them as though we could hold onto him through his things. We both had to have this one or that one. And now we just give them away.

I pull off my shoes and walk past my own book shelves filled with my books and John’s. The memories are not lodged inside them.

My Unlikely Life Mission: Self-defense as Physical Literacy

This week I'm proud to feature an article by an amazing friend of mine. Like me, Ellen works to empower women. Like me, she wants you to read this! The pictures are of her speaking to the factory workers mentioned below and of the self-defense class we teach.

by Ellen Snortland- USA

Midnight. Intensely urban downtown neighborhood in Los Angeles where the alleys reek of urine and garbage. Dark Craftsman house in the Carpenter-Gothic style. My home. I cross the threshold and meet an interrupted burglar who raises his knife, ready to plunge it into my throat or heart. My scream is so intense he drops his knife, grabs his ears and runs like hell. “Thank you, mister,” I neglect to yell, because I was yet to know the impact this event would have on the balance of my life.

I’m truly grateful to this man, wherever he may be now. He inadvertently led me to my life’s mission, passion and purpose: to empower women and girls worldwide to know and act on the idea that they have a birthright to be safe from violence and to be able to defend themselves physically, if need be. I assert that if and when the females of our species learn how to stop violence while it’s happening to them, we’d see a transformation in women’s potential and in their participation in problem-solving on the planet within a remarkably short time.
The adage “Think Globally, Act Locally” applies perfectly. Nothing is more local than one’s body, and if a critical mass of women could protect their own bodies, the globe would benefit greatly.

From my experience with the man and his knife, I write a book about my investigation into female self-defense entitled “Beauty Bites Beast: Awakening the Warrior within Women and Girls.” Very few people want to discuss the possibility of violence, and so are in varying degrees of denial. In the U.S., we have no problem fully confronting the possibility of fire or car accidents by having drills, we learn how to drive “defensively”; we insure ourselves to the hilt and wear seatbelts. But intentional violence directed toward people, especially “defenseless” people (women, girls and boys)? Most people don’t want to think about it, let alone prepare for it.

Does it make any sense that I — a well-educated, well-read, well-traveled, well-off person — would not automatically make self-protection a part of wellness, in general? Why was I, an independent woman of the modern era, completely and utterly ignorant about defending myself from a possibly violent occurrence even though I live in a culture that swims in violence both in the news and in the entertainment media? Why had I never made it important to take a self-defense class? And why did I only make self-defense a part of my education after something scared me enough to take action? I set about to answer those questions from a personal and social point of view in my book I found there’s a dearth of studies on women defending themselves. As it turns out, I was opening up a new field.

On the professional front, “Beauty Bites Beast,” my publisher discovers, is not an easy sell to reviewers. Even though it’s not a “how-to” book, reviewers reject it and place it in the female book “ghetto,” which makes it not reviewable. In our system, if a book is not reviewed, for all intents and purposes it does not exist. Nonetheless “Beauty Bites Beast” does exist, and fortunately I’ve have enough word of mouth endorsement that it continues to sell to this day. Gavin De Becker, best-selling author of “The Gift of Fear” and world renowned violence prevention expert, dubs “Beauty Bites Beast” a “classic,” and a “must read.”

So what is it going to take to place personal violence into the public discourse without reviews? Why isn’t my topic taken seriously? Promoting my book turns out to be a bit like peddling cod liver oil: yes, it must be “good for you,” but who wants it, since it tastes awful?

My challenge: how do I make an unpalatable subject — gender-directed violence — so palatable that responsible people feel they must include it in their sphere of learning? My other challenge: how do I break through the entrenched apathy toward women’s and girls’ status in the world, which is in large part kept in place because of and through violence, whether real or merely threatened? Force, or the threat of force, keeps women down very effectively -- in their own estimation and in families, communities, countries throughout the world. No wonder our voices are missing in the public sphere. I conclude that the threat of gender-directed force is the dark underbelly and the mainly unarticulated tapestry of patriarchy; its threads are so emotional, hidden, tangled and complex that I must find a more neutral way to spread my mission of self-protection as a human right.

Consequently I decide to frame the conversation about violence within a less provocative context of literacy, instead of staying solely within the realm of gender politics. Everyone aspires to literacy, right? But physical literacy… what is that? A physically literate person knows how to cross a street safely. She or he also knows that kitchen safety includes washing hands before food preparation. A physically literate person knows that using a seat belt in a car is not only legally mandated in most developed countries, but has also been shown to reduce injury and death in car accidents.

Similarly, a physically literate person should know how to block a hit, use an eye-strike or any number of easy-to-teach, easy-to-learn, self-protection skills and tools not dependent on sheer strength or weight to stop an assault effectively. If you have no clue what you might do if someone were to attack you, I assert you are physically illiterate. This is a radical idea. Therefore I usually talk with people about violence prevention in the context of “stranger” violence, because there at least is a consensus that strangers don’t have the right to go around hitting other strangers, regardless of gender.

In reality, the statistics about the violence women and girls live and die with show they are most likely to be hurt or killed by their so-called intimates. According to a Rutgers study, “Around the world, 1 in 3 women have been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in their lifetime. Most often, the abuser is a member of her own family.”

When I attended the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in 1995 I asked every woman I met there if she was concerned about her personal safety. Tragically, the answer was a resounding “Yes!” no matter whether I was speaking to a high-level executive from the World Bank or a woman from a small village in Africa. Walking around in a woman’s body is dangerous! I decided I had to introduce the conversation about personal self-defense at an international level.

The third article of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), abridged version, says, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” “Everyone” includes women, girls and boys, and their own personal security falls squarely into the UDHR. The third goal of the United Nations 8 Millennium Development Goals is to “Promote gender equality and empower women.” Indeed, I believe in spreading the word whether by mouth, book or film. Throwing a handful of sand or gravel into an attacker’s eyes may spell the difference between life and death. Making that information common knowledge is a moral imperative since it can save countless women’s and girls’ lives. In the most primitive form of biological warfare, HIV-infected mercenaries intentionally rape women with the goal of infecting and killing them. Not only does a woman have a right to defend herself from rape, she has the right to save her own life from HIV/AIDs.

After attending the annual U.N. Commission on the Status of Women for several years in a row as a journalist and NGO delegate for the United Nations Association, I learned first-hand that “self-protection” is notably absent from the usual discourse on ending violence against women. So on several occasions I have forced myself to ask publicly, “Are there any plans to educate women in developing countries on simple self-defense techniques?” knowing full well that my question would be ignored or minimized. Nonetheless, the topic deserves not just attention but serious consideration. I believe the question is met with such resistance because fundamentally both women and men have unexamined thoughts and prejudices about female human beings’ inherent inability to defend themselves.

We would never question whether a female lion or dog, for instance, should or shouldn’t defend herself. Self-protection within other species is not gendered. We don’t consider a female dog any less able to defend herself than a male. Whether she “wins” or not is a discussion separate from her gender; it depends on whether she’s got a litter, her size or other similarly variable factors. If we encounter a growling dog, we do not check to see if the dog is a male or female before we decide if we should be cautious in proceeding.

Knowing full well that the “nurture or nature” jury is not done deliberating, I assert that women’s so-called defenselessness is largely a result of nurture rather than nature. I also assert that not defending oneself is largely “unnatural” and a result of patriarchy, not biology.


In my effort to extend this conversation to as many people as possible, I’ve embarked on a documentary film project by the same name as my book, “Beauty Bites Beast.” An altruistic factory owner in Tijuana read my book and invited me to train the women who work for him. I, along with many incredible full-force, full-impact instructors from all over the U.S. trained over 20 women in his factory for an intensive course that transformed their lives. United Farm Workers co-founder and feminist activist Dolores Huerta delivered the women’s graduation speech. We saw the women grow from people convinced of their helplessness to citizens who stood up and declared, “No one ever gets to hit me again.” We left Tijuana knowing that at least 25 women would be ending violence in their families once and for all.

Now, as I release the 10th anniversary edition of the book “Beauty Bites Beast” and work to complete my film, I am still resolute. Women must reclaim their natural ability to be physically dangerous in order to achieve true freedom.

I am constantly amazed at how many women, upon hearing what my mission is, say, “I want my daughter/niece/grandchild to read your book” or “I want her to learn how to defend herself!” Rarely will a woman say, “I need to read your book,” or “I need to learn how to defend myself.” Explore that reaction if it’s yours: find out where it’s coming from and what it’s based on. I challenge mothers to include teaching their offspring how to defend themselves as a vital part of a “natural” job of good mothering and parenting; far more often than not, I meet daughters who tell me it was their fathers who taught them self-defense basics.

Let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes by fellow “missionary,” Alice Paul:

Women’s dearest possession is life,
And since it is given to her but once
She must live as to feel no torturing regret
For years without purpose,
So live as not to be scarred with the shame of
A cowardly and trivial past
So live that dying she can say:
All my life and all my strength
Was given to the finest cause in the world
The liberation of womankind.

- Alice Paul, 1885-1977American suffrage leader and author of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923

About the AuthorEllen Snortland’s work as an author, self-defense advocate and instructor has been featured on Dateline NBC with her book, “Beauty Bites Beast.” A regular columnist for the Pasadena Weekly and frequent contributor to Ms. Magazine, she is a tireless advocate for women and girls and physical safety for all. Ms. Snortland believes that “Think Globally, Act Locally,” is vital for women and girls. She says, “There’s nothing more local than one’s own body.” Ellen received her Juris Doctorate from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

As a UNA delegate, co-chair of Fifty-Fifty Leadership and journalist, Ellen has attended United Nations world conferences and annual UN meetings. Her acclaimed one-woman show, “Now That She’s Gone” is a comic memoir about growing up as a Norwegian American in Colorado and South Dakota, which she is currently planning on having produced in a regular theater venue and as a touring show. She is also raising funds for and directing, “Beauty Bites Beast,” a documentary based on her self-defense advocacy. For more information, visit her organization’s website.