133- Feminism (3) - how I became a feminist

***trigger warning*** domestic violence, abuse

After my two previous posts about feminism (99 & 132) I thought to discuss now how I became a feminist, a few years before I even knew the term... 

It all started with my various traumas, evidently... but, more precisely, the examples that my misogynist father gave me through his violence towards my mothers. 
The first mother, my birth mother, was badly abused by him. Although I repressed all memories pertaining to those few years, I am more than certain that it impacted my psyche and emotional predispositions... 


My second mother was a woman I believed was my real mother for quite some time. I witnessed all the horror of the domestic violence my father directed towards her, and all the memories associated with these acts are quite intact in my mind and my psyche. I took in the full blast of it, but also could see how unjust my father was and how he was wrong with his violent acts as well as all his hurtful words and screaming at her for the most insignificant reasons... 

His religious soup presented itself as an amalgam of all other religions and my father who made this soup would profess unity between all religions and between men and women, because god was actually both a man and a woman... 

However, in practice, everything about him was misogyny and even as a kid, I could slowly understand that he was constantly contradicting his own words - through every single act that would mean 'do what I say, not what I preach', and that just didn't compute in my brain because I needed to find the logical link between acts and words. 

As I couldn't find it - because there wasn't any to be found - I became quite confused and the grain of doubt became seeded in my mind.

At about age 10, my father forbade me talking to any girl, with a death threat. 

In parallel, I discovered feminist literature with several books, namely Little Women, and especially one that marked me greatly : Jane Eyre. She became my personal hero, as I felt strong affinities and identified with her plights.  

During a few months, I was sent to some additional religious ''classes'' on saturdays. Still confused and now a teen with hormones I realized that for 3 weeks already I had been following a girl that I found really pretty - but never approached her. 
I realized that I was stalking her, and that I was making her feel fear- and I could tell this because she had hastened her steps. 

That moment of realization was a turning point in life. I was acting wrongly and I immediately stopped stalking this girl and turned on my heels. 

From that moment, I researched everything that I could by going, in secret, to the libraries in town and read more books about feminist topics. 

I consider my becoming a feminist as my one of my biggest steps in posttraumatic growth, as it launched a huge passion in life and also set the tone to my quest to help and heal, where my father had hurt and destroyed lives.

At that time of my life, I wanted to set things right and balance his acts with my own - something that I no longer view precisely the same way but rather as my own acts for themselves : to be kind and compassionate, for the sake of helping because I'm not responsible for my father's bad choices - only my own actions and words.