June 20, 1999.

Well, I'm back. I had thought that I would transcribe the paper journal I kept this weekend at the conference, but I'm too embarrassed. I found out today, after 48 hours of angry thought, that I'd entirely missed the point of the gathering, and that my journal ranting is incredibly petty as a result.

To summarize, then:

I went to this conference expecting to experience the sympathetic magic of female groups, the kind I've experienced in a woman's circle and this year at the orgasm workshop. I felt let down. There were no women my age. no women with the same desire to tug and pull at the edges of orthodoxy to see what it was made of. No shit disturbers, and thus I thought there were no deep thinkers. So I began the conference with pride in my superior critical abilities and my superior learning. This soon translated into contempt for the middle-class women surrounding me, and that burned at me like acid.

This morning I found out that Audrey, an octogenarian in my response group, had not only traveled around the world, had not only received the wisdom of age, but had done her degree in English and history just like me. Not only that, my darlings, but she went to u of t and was taught by Northrop Frye...not to mention later teaching English to Alice Munro. Yes, Giller-winning Canadian novelist Alice Munro.

And all this time I'd come on like I was the only woman ever to open a book. It was...humiliating. Humbling. Embarrassing. I made a point of talking briefly to her before she left, to explain that I had mistaken arrogance and disagreeableness for enlightenment and I had failed to give anybody but myself their intellectual due. She was wonderful. All these women were, if I just let my snobbish guard down for three seconds. She told me that my arrogance was baggage of my age, and that it would go away all to soon. She saw how upset I was below the smile, and she hugged me awkwardly, her arms full of conference papers and dragged down my an enormous white purse. She also told me that it was not all arrogance, that some of it was confidence, and that being beautiful and intelligent, I had it all.

It was a lovely conversation, but I'm entirely convinced that my proud spirit does not need to be mortified. I'm self-consciously medieval like that.

I also had problems with my mother this weekend. Consumed as I was with pulling against the flow of energy, I disrupted her good time, and made her feel lonely. For my part, I didn't want to touch so much. I didn't want to sway when we sang. Perhaps this is my second childhood that I need to stand alone once to prove that I can do it. Maybe it's another facet of my all-pervading pride.

Overall, it was wrong for me. Not because I didn't take anything away. This lesson I've told you was very very uncomfortable to realize and I'm convinced that an uncomfortable knowledge of myself in an important reign on my tendency to act as if I knew best always. But this was a conference for women who do not feel the need to squabble and cite uncomfortable precedent, like I do. This is a not a conference for divisiveness, as I tried to make it. I mistook understanding and solidarity for complacency, and it frustrated me. I missed the point that this weekend was to learn, not expropriate for other cultures. (The theme was aboriginal Canadians, and I quarreled for days about what I called 'cultural tokenism' and was really nothing of the sort). It was to find badly needed union in a world which splits us with family and jobs and other well-meaning important organizations.

But I wasn't ready for this unity. I have not solved to my satisfaction, spiritual matters which no longer prey on these women. I am not ready to be a thread in their loom...I'm trying too hard to be by myself. part of that is the snobbery, and part of it is my age. I don't know some things that these women take for granted simply because I am not in the same temporal place as them.

So, not a failure. But I think the lesson is that I have few more years of wailing in the wilderness before I can accept the care of these women and find myself integrated among them.