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I got in touch with certain feelings, I was feeling vulnerable, it was almost a kinetic feeling; and it had to do with never having had the permission to feel that before. In fact, before, my behaviour and attitude were almost compensory. I sort of acted tough. When I came to the F.S.W. I felt like I was exposed physically. I felt a constant sensation of weakness and vulnerability which was overwhelming. It frightened me, but mostly it generated a lot of feeling of anger; and maybe it was just that for the first time there was permission to be angry. It was the first time that I had really gone through experiencing my periods, feeling like my insides were coming out, I felt very splayed, and bloody, and open. I didn't particularly like it; anger and vulnerability were almost simultaneous. I had confused helplessness with openness. Being allowed to express myself stimulated a lot of old pain about my oppression. After a while, I went through a lot of stuff about authority on a conscious level -- I mean I always had stuff about authority -- but I hadn't dealt with it concsiously. Instead I reacted to authority by acting tough, and sometimes rebellious.

My experience in the second year, had a lot to do with seeing other women (from the first year) at a different stage. A lot of them were not in touch with their oppression, and/or their sexual identification as women. So that made me feel a little less helpless, and also made me feel a little bored. It became a process that I recognized, one that I didn't necessarily want to reenact. I felt like I had more opportunity to make choices, whether or not I wanted to continue to feel helpless and other-identified. I wanted to take on responsibility for the Building -- the Building being a metaphor for my development -- and I realized nobody else was going to take care of me unless I was willing to. I was angry at the Building, when I first came, because it wasn't taking care of me, or itself in some ways. And then, later on, I wanted to take responsibility, and felt crazed because I was so worried that it (i.e. me) wasn't going to succeeed. Then, when I took more active responsibility for certain aspects of the Woman's Building, I experienced other women's anger at the Building and at me. At that point I realized where the Building was at, where I was at, and where other women were at, which had all been identified in my experience. I realized that the success of the Building was only as good as the ability of the women participating to move out of the space of our own frustration. Finally, the issue of anger and helplessness gave way to just getting the job done. At that point I became involved in reality testing, moving out of fantasy into reality, and see what value my efforts really have.