#107: Crossing Boundaries with #MeToo Activist Rowena Chiu

On Feb 6th I published show #106: Let's Get Loud. It was a call to action for you and for me to show up and take up space, to speak up and tell our stories because in my opinion that is the way we change the narratives, revise the limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world and our best hope for making a better future for our children. That week I was feeling clear and passionate about all the ways we can bring it. Everywhere I looked I heard confirmation of the importance of speaking up.

-Reminders that my generation can learn from our millenial and gen x kids and friends about transparency and authenticity and the new media…social media.

That it’s time for us to stop playing small, to stop hiding and come on forward.

That as I still hear from women who have successfully held powerful careers and then taken a break to parent, to launch the next generation of humans into the world, one of the most important and underacknowledged jobs there is, saying they face the feeling of being invisible in the world and it occurs to me over and over again that there is a lot of rewriting of the narratives for women, about aging and about being a woman of color. And again the antidote to feeling and being invisible is speaking up.

And it's not always easy!

My interview today is an important reminder of the deep need for us to speak up, regardless of all the cultural, historically and emotional reasons we might not.

I met Rowena Chiu through the Bay Area independent learning community which I co-founded with Jennifer Dees in 2008 when Rowena was for a brief time a member of that group exploring the possibility of homeschooling her eldest child.

When I recorded this conversation with Rowena last Wednesday she was right in the middle of nonstop interviews about breaking the NDA she’d been pressured into signing two decades ago and which kept her silent for all that time about Harvey Weinstein attempting to rape her when she was his assistant in 1998.

We are at such a collective tipping point and it is becoming increasingly clear that when we speak up we don’t just do it for ourselves but our bravery contributes to the collective.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Life Lessons

You Matter. Raise your voice and tell that story because you don't know how your story is going to be received or the impact it's going to have. It will matter to someone.
Be Patient. For the #MeToo Movement we can use patience to remember that change doesn't happen overnight.
Your Children Will Survive. I didn't think I could be empowered because my children need me. But the village and the children step up. Don't underestimate them.

Rowena Chiu on Facebook

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