Motivated Sadness

Look This Way - Look That Way

(Sophia gestures toward a winding path, one direction leading to a shadowed grove, the other to a sunlit fountain.)

Sophia: Welcome, Christine. That path forks, as life so often does. I've often observed how people feel constrained by the very form they inhabit. You, I know, felt a deep sense of misfortune, believing your life's work was hampered by the simple fact of your birth.

Christine: It was not a simple fact, Sophia. I felt as if the world itself had dealt me an unfair hand. The opportunities, the recognition, the very voice I had—it was all muffled and overshadowed simply because I was born a woman. I saw how men could walk straight toward the sunlit fountain you show me, while my own road was forced toward the gloom, constantly fighting the dark grove just to see a speck of light.

I considered myself most unfortunate because God had made me inhabit a female body in this world
— Christine de Pizan (1364-1440)

Sophia: You saw the world looking one way—toward the expectation of what a woman should be—and you perceived that view as a limitation. But in that perceived misfortune, you did something extraordinary. Instead of succumbing to the shadows, you turned your gaze the other way.

Christine: I had to. The feeling of being less than was a constant irritant. It pushed me to ask: is this really all there is? Am I defined only by this vessel? I had to find a way to let my intellect and my spirit step outside the confines of the flesh that felt so restricting.

Sophia: Indeed. You realized that true worth and capacity aren't determined by the body, nor by the world’s narrow lens on it, but by the fire within. You didn't just lament the unfairness; you used that very constraint as the fuel to build a new house—a City of Ladies, a place in which the self was defined by reason and virtue, not by gender. You looked away from the societal dictates and toward the potential of the soul.

Christine: I simply longed for a time when the world wouldn't look at my body first, but at the words I wrote, the logic I presented.

Sophia: And that, my dear Christine, is the wisdom you gifted us. When you felt forced to "Look This Way"—at the misfortune of being born female in a man's world—you defiantly chose to "Look That Way," and in doing so, you carved out a path for everyone to see themselves not as an accident of nature, but as a deliberate creation of intellect. The vessel may be assigned, but the journey taken in it is chosen.

Do you think that choice—to define yourself by what is within rather than what is without—is the key to overcoming any societal obstacle?

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Motivated Sadness