Their Power Lives in Me

Years ago, in a team exercise, we were asked to name five words we were drawn to. Most people reach for gentle words in a room like that. Curiosity. Balance. Growth. One of mine was Power.

The room shifted a little. Power is the word you are not supposed to want. We hear it and picture the people who rule things, the ones who take up all the air in a room and leave none for anyone else. To say you are drawn to it sounds like a confession.

I have sat with that reaction for years, and I have come to think it is a mistake. Not a small one. A mistake about what the word actually means.

Power comes from the Latin posse, to be able. Strip away everything we have piled on top of it and what is left is simple. Capacity. The ability to act. Long before it meant authority over other people, it meant only this.

The philosophers who took the word seriously split it in two. Potestas is power over others, the power of a rank, a name on a door. It is loud and it is borrowed, and it lasts only as long as other people agree to be governed by it. Potentia is something else entirely. It is the power to act from your own nature, to be the author of your own life rather than the effect of everyone else's. It cannot be granted, because it was never anyone's to give. It cannot be taken, because it does not sit in a title.

One of these is easy. The other is the work of a lifetime.

The kind I was drawn to is the second kind, and I did not understand for a long time how much it costs.

Power-to looks like freedom from the outside. From the inside it is mostly subtraction. It meant saying no when yes was easier and would have kept the peace. It meant boundaries that cost me people I had known for decades, people I loved, because staying close to them meant becoming smaller than I was willing to be. It meant walking toward the things that frightened me on the strength of nothing more than a feeling in my gut that the strange path was the right one, while people I respected told me, kindly, that I was making a mistake.

There is a name for that in the old books. Paul Tillich called it the courage to be. Not the absence of fear, but the decision to affirm your own existence in the face of everything that says you should not. You do not get there by waiting for the fear to leave. It does not leave. You act inside it.

I tell you all of this because it is the only honest way to explain what I am building, and why.

I have two grandmothers in mind when I work.

One of them is in a photograph I keep. She was full of energy and light, the kind of person a room arranged itself around. Late in her life she lost her ability to speak and to write. The photographs of her are still here. I can hold them in my hand. But the stories behind them are gone. I look at her face and I know there was a whole life in there, and I cannot tell you most of it, because the person who could is no longer able to, and the rest of us never thought to ask in time.

My other grandmother was a nurse on the front lines of a world war. She survived it. Sit with that for a moment, with everything she must have seen and carried and done. We lost her to Alzheimer's, and almost none of it survives with us now. A few fragments. The rest went with her.

This is the part I cannot make peace with. Not the illness. The silence it leaves behind. A family is, in the end, a set of stories handed from one generation to the next. When the telling stops, more than memory is lost. The people in the photographs slowly become strangers we happen to be related to.

But the silence did not get everything. They are both still in me.

The woman full of energy and light, the one whose stories I cannot recover, is the reason a room has never frightened me. The nurse who walked toward a war when every instinct says run is the reason I can walk toward the things that scare me on nothing more than a feeling that they are right. The illness took their words. It took most of their memories, but their power lives in me. I build this in honor of their legacy.

This is what a family really hands down, when it works. Not only the stories, but the power inside them. The nerve. The light. The refusal to be made smaller. It travels in the telling. That is why the silence costs what it costs. When the stories stop, the handing down stops with them.

So I am building for the opposite of that silence.

Something that helps families hold onto their stories and, just as much, keep making new ones together. That gets the questions asked while there is still someone to answer them. That turns old photographs back into stories, and makes sure the next set of photographs already has its stories attached. Not a record of a life assembled after it is gone, but a living thing a family adds to while everyone is still in the room.

This is not a product to me. It is a position. It is the same power that stopped me in that meeting years ago, turned outward now. The power to author your own life, and to help the people you love stay the authors of theirs.

If you have your own photographs with the stories missing, you already understand this. You know the particular ache of holding a picture and not being able to say who that really was, or what they would have wanted you to know. I am building so that fewer people inherit that silence. I would like you with me. The people I want around this are the ones who read all of this and thought of a face.

This is the work I want my name on. I think it might be worth yours.

Thank you.