THE LIBERATION OF SOUL

I am early to bed, early to rise.

But even earlier to rise, and later to bed the past couple of months, fulfilling the mission of Finding Our Voices since COVID-19 took hold with increased isolation bringing increased danger to women trapped in intimate partner abuse situations.

Starting my day hours before the sun comes up reminds me of another photography project and unhealthy time: About six years ago when I was putting together the book “My Island” about the summer and year-round children on Islesboro, Vinalhaven and North Haven. 

Then, I set my alarm as early as 2:30  a.m. in order to get in a few hours of concentrated work before someone living in the house with me woke up, and I had to shut down all personal pursuits that took me away from that person — shutting down as well, as I have come to discover, pretty much everything that made me, me, such as creativity, life dreams, and opinions, and all to keep the peace and, ironically because of the deadening effect of this, to stay alive.

Autumn in window of Cutting Edge hair salon in Camden.

Autumn, currently on the “Let’s Talk About It” window banners at Rock City Cafe,  Cutting Edge and Vinalhaven’s Nightingale restaurant,  perfectly summed up the dynamic of these soul-vampires, who lure you in by building you up, then systematically makes you smaller and smaller and smaller because his (and it could be a woman as well) perfect mate is someone who has no existence at all outside of pleasing him.

“Let me tell you, once you make it to the other side ‘Oh Girl, it’s a party over here!” Autumn wrote on a Facebook post., responding to another FOV Voice, Mary Lou. “I'm not talking the kind that leave you with regret and a hangover: It's more of a celebration, every day. I am two years out of the dark and I still wake up giggly. The way liberation feels for me is as if it’s Christmas every morning. I legit wake up and ask myself ‘What do I want to do today?’

“I wake up and am free to do as I damn well please. It's the liberation of your soul.”

Here is last Wednesday, a typical for me now:

3:30 a.m. Feet into slippers, coffee into press pot. Turn computer on and make notes for the next revision of our website-in-progress. 

Just as the exhibit that launched Finding Our Voices was about to open at the Camden Public Library last Valentine’s Day, a fairy Godmother in the name of CJ Kenna materialized.  She gave the project and exhibit a logo, professional-looking graphics, and website, and all pro-bono. 

Last week Finding Our Voices received notice from the IRS that we are an official 501c3-non-profit. Time to refresh our website, getting in the avalanche of recent projects and press. CJ being too busy, I needed to find someone to take this on.  But who?

I wanted the look of the website to be professional but not corporate, reflecting our grass-roots nature, and also for it to be artistic and bold, reflecting our marshaling of the arts to jolt people awake to the terrorizing going on behind more closed doors than anyone imagines.

Reconnecting with Mike Perrault, 28-year-old wunderkind director of the Maine International Film Festival, I checked out that festival’s website and liked it more than any website I had seen of Portland design firms.

Three days later I had the website of my dreams. Now, the fun part of tweaking—I ask him to do something I think will take hours— and on the other end of the line some laptop clicks, a singsong “Doot da dooo” and then “Done!”

6:30 a.m. Head out to take I-phone photos of the Women in Windows. 

When the banners starting going up across the Midcoast (now in 56 businesses), I photographed them and host establishments as straight documentation. The reflections kept getting in the way. I ordered a Polarizer filter that promised to reduce this. But before the filter arrived in the mail, I saw something in the windows I hadn’t noticed before, and now I work with the reflections, welcoming the magical elements that come from time of day, light, angle, objects in the foreground, and my own concentration and observation.

10 a.m. Check in with my awesome six-week teen apprentice.  Lyra Kalajian’s senior project assignment from Watershed School is “making the world a better place.” She is developing a teen offshoot of Finding Our Voices, and we go over her first assignment of identifying the “What” of relationship abuse in her age group through conversations with friends and her own experiences.

11 a.m: Phone conversation with 19-year-old Emerson film school student Gideon. We are figuring out how best to use his talents for a second film (the first, which I commissioned from Director Daniel Quintanilla, just got full funding from Kickstarter, and will premiere online in a couple of weeks) to get people talking about intimate partner abuse. 

Noon: Get out press release to island newspaper, Working Waterfront. This week, thanks to Phil Crossman on Vinalhaven and the director of the Medical Center on Islesboro Dorie Henning, Let’s Talk About It banners are on both islands, and thanks to full funding by Camden National Bank, Finding Our Voices SOS mailers with the New Hope hotline are in every mailbox on Islesboro.  

1:30 Zoom conversation with new Finding Our Voices board member. Sarah Gilbert, joining Jon Wilson, Alexandra Ames Lawrence, and Kimberly Davis, is making a strong board even stronger. Specializing in complex and contested family litigation as a parter at Camden Law, she represents a number of my Survivor correspondents, all of whom are grateful to her personal sensitivity and legal strategy.  In advance of the next board meeting, Sarah and I come up with a very exciting concept that will get the victims’ voices heard in the courts.

2:30 p.m. Long Grain lunch take-out with Eve.  Eve was a powerful voice on our Survivor Speaks panel at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center in Augusta, Maine last fall, is one of four Survivors on our new Podcast. Bringing me a customized Power and Control Wheel and posing for my camera makes her the 21st Voice in Finding Our Voices, and on a Let’s Talk About It banner heading to Ellsworth!

5 p.m. Further website edits to Mike.

8 p.m. Edit audio of Survivor Podcast/radio show. The first episode is a wide-ranging conversation amongst me, Alison, Eve, and Sarah, with many exclamations of “Yes!” and “Me too!” We share, compare, and contrast our experiences of living with angry and controlling men as this relates to COVID-19, children, police and courts, and Silence— ours, families’ and friends’, society’s.

And that’s it (except for some glorious FaceTime with my granddaughter) for April 29. A bit of reading, then kick off my slippers, pull up the covers, and drift off to sleep, as in Autumn’s quote from above, blissfully happy with today and looking forward to tomorrow.