...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
Interpretation
Being open and visible may expose us to risk, but it also empowers us with strength.
Audre Lorde's quote highlights the paradox of vulnerability and strength, suggesting that our willingness to be seen and to reveal our true selves, while it can lead to exposure and potential harm, ultimately serves as a wellspring of our greatest power. Embracing our vulnerabilities allows us to connect with others, cultivate resilience, and draw on our inherent strengths.
In practice
In a motivational speech to encourage team members to embrace their true selves.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right.
Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.
Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.
What do you have to fear? Nothing. Whom do you have to fear? No one. Why? Because whoever has joined forces with God obtains three great privileges: omnipotence without power, intoxication without wine, and life without death.
I showed her how I'd been making tiny cuts in my skin to let the badness and the pain leak out. They were shallow at first, and short, like claw marks made by a desperate cat that wanted to hid under the front porch. Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care.
I jumped on the grenade that was thrown at myself and my friend. I don't recommend it.
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