I feel impotent in my life. It has been this way ever since I can remember.  How I think about it has changed with a tremendous amount of effort. A journey of healing that is in progress. Today, I would say that I struggle with "agency." The feeling of power in my actions to produce a particular outcome in my life. This is different from control over my life, which is a bit of a myth. Control over life belongs to a realm of greater forces beyond any human. Rightfully so. Agency is a capacity we cultivate. Agency is the capacity to meet what shows up in my life and look it dead in the eyes. Agency and a sense of internal empowerment go hand in hand. 

As a women, a "colored" women, more precisely a "wheat-ish" women, I know the experience of disempowerment. It feels imposed on me. I only feel it as an absence of my on intrinsic experience of agency. It sits in me like self-inflicted victimhood which gets reconfirmed by the cultures around me. Perhaps it begins with being...