One Month: Round Up
Today marks one month since initiating the Leenah’s Lounge. My real challenge, I realized this afternoon, hasn’t really been conducting the Twentea Stories sessions. The actual challenge, I feel now, is to emphatically translate the insights obtained at the Lounge into meaningful and actionable knowledge. 36 sessions and over a dozen guests later, I’m still struggling to make peace with the frequency and ferocity of the examples the survivors of the oppression of fitting-in have shared. I’ve talked to men and women; ages: 23 to 53; fresh graduates to parents of fresh graduates; home makers to those in search of home. And repeatedly I have come face to face with the same pattern. We are all alone. And we are all struggling to fit into the mould we’re expected to adhere to. The societal makeup we follow is designed to ensure compliance, like all reforming facilities. Like jails. The unwritten social contract is more about defining the limits of a person, than it is about providing them