There is an old story that comes out of the East:

Just before the launch of Humanity 1.0 (so to speak) the Gods sat around in Heaven discussing the issue of where to hide each human's soul. They didn't want to make the greatest gift too easy to find.

One said, "Why don't we hide it in an animal, like a deer? It is beautiful, and fleet - hard to catch."

But the others said, "No, that won't work at all, because they will eventually kill the deer to eat their meat, and the soul will be released and they will find it too easily."

Another one of the Gods spoke up. "Why don't we hide it in trees. They are sturdy and will last for eons and protect the soul well."

But the others said, "No, no, that won't work either. They will cut down the trees to make fire and to build shelter, and that also will be too easy an access."

The Gods pondered and pondered, bringing up suggestion after suggestion. For a short time - which for a God is still, of course, an eternity - they felt stumped.

i was eleven years old when my father took me to the hospital to see my mother who had gone in for “some tests for bursitis”. He warned me that she might be hooked up to some tubes and that it shouldn’t upset me. An emotionally buoyant little girl, I was not cowed by that warning and I bounced into the room and up onto her bed to hug her.
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Which is when she told me that she was actually in hospital for a biopsy. And that she had breast cancer.

I started to cry. And she – alarmed because she didn’t want to turn into a river of tears herself – said urgently, “No, no! Don’t cry!” And I stopped. Immediately. My emotional reaction was too much for my mother to bear, and I would have done anything for her. So I held it all back.

Years later when I entered the business arena, I encountered a different type of fear of emotion, one that all women come to understand in this Western culture of ours: emotion is both the butt of too many jokes about us and an accusation leveled against us when we seem too powerful. I was a little surprised, some years even further on, when I began to hear emotion referred to more positively, more as “a consummation devoutly to be wished” (to quote Mr. Shakespeare) when someone (generally a man) needed to laud his intuition.

But it is clear to every woman that emotion is judged differently for women than it is for men. To highlight this situation, allow me to usie a very recent and notable example.

At first, it felt like standing naked in public, with nowhere to run! Terrifying, shocking, and almost comical.The first time I stepped onto a professional stage to audition for a play, my knees literally knocked — I could actually hear them! — and the paper in my hand was audible too: shaking beyond my control to stop it. God knows how I read the lines on that paper when it was shaking so hard, but somehow I managed.

I have to tell you also that the feeling of being naked and unprotected also felt magnificent! It was a feeling of aliveness so focused, so intense, I realized that I had never before been so alive, and that I wanted to live in that peak experience most of the time from then on! But how? I was in business!!!

Well I did become a professional actor. On the side. I was absolutely addicted to the feeling of immediacy, truthfulness, openness and that quicksilver skittering of aliveness across the nerve ends that accompanies opening up in public. I still worked in corporate America, but I dreamed of becoming a full-time actor.

I was eighteen years old and working my very first office job. It was a temporary position through Kelly Services - known then by the infantilizing name of "Kelly Girls". Being as I was then, a good little girl and more than eager to please, I brought all of my desire to please to this position. I was ready to scale tall buildings in a single bound, walk through fire, dedicate myself to whatever was asked of me!

In I walked, ready to take on the most onerous tasks. I was nervous, I was scared, but I was strong and ready.

The boss sat me down and gave me a large stack of forms, four pages to a form, and told me to separate them by color.

Pink sheets here, yellow there, blue over here, and green over here. That was it: the whole job.

​I thought I had died. I knew I hadn't gone to heaven. 

Two hours in, I got a call from Kelly Girls. I had been fired. I couldn't understand it! I had been dutifully separating the forms - no mixing of greens and blues - and suddenly I was fired? What had happened?

Being eighteen, and a good girl, I didn't question a thing. I just...went home. Being a really good girl, I blamed myself. I hadn't yet learned to be a threat to insecure authority figures by speaking up and asking questions, or walking out of bad situations before being asked to.

Now, fast forward to adulthood.