Why You Should Be The One To Tell Your Story
*trigger warning: this article mentions rape*
The rooms in the Uffizi museums in Florence are full of wonders. It was beautiful but also a bit frustrating to look at how the art has evolved because everywhere I looked there were colourful, ingenious paintings made by … men (I’m not even going to mention that they were white men).
Until one room finally brought some female talent, I was so excited about the representation and quickly moved to read the story of one of the female painters, Artemisia Gentileschi.
Artemisia makes her appearance in Rome working for her father Orazio, an artist from Tuscany very active in Rome in the first decade of the seventeenth century […]. After a challenging trial for rape, Artemisia moves to Florence …
When I read the descriptions for the male painters they mentioned their style and transformations and innovations brought to the world. But not for Artemisia, she will forever be the woman whose dad painted and who was raped and got the man on trial for it (let’s cheer to the fact that she won BTW).
When you don’t share your story, someone else is going to do it for you.
And that someone else will share your story from their perspective. In the case of Artemisia, the story was written in a time when women didn’t have the right to speak up. As a result, that’s how history remembers Artemisia.
Don’t be the next Artemisia. Don’t let someone else share your story. Dig it up, accept it, and share it.
And yes, that includes sharing it through your business.