Mary Long is a…

This is the part where I’m supposed to trot out my accomplishments for you to read so you can be impressed. This is the very belief system that I am trying to eradicate, so I am having a hard time complying.

What I will tell you is that I am a born and raised Chicagoan and I love my city.

I will also tell you that I am convicted that it is women who will heal this world and I believe deeply in the power of women. I believe that when women shake loose of ingrained habits and beliefs about who we are; when we stop criticizing each other and start supporting each other, we will see the kind of movement that will truly change the world. I believe that women united is one of the most powerful forces in the universe and that power is needed now more than ever.

My journey to this point has not been straight. I have experienced periods of time when miracles were raining down on me, and periods where I was lost and in the desert without a compass.

This crooked journey has given me many experiences. For those of you who need them, here are some of the wonderful things I’ve experienced;

I am a mother and a writer, and my work can be found in various anthologies and magazine articles, as well as in the novels Grace and Remembering Heaven, which are available as ebooks on Amazon.

I have been a radio talk show host at WGN and WLS in Chicago, and WENY in New York.

I have been a women’s retreat leader and a speaker at various women’s groups.

I am a Certified Death Midwife who has had the sacred honor of aiding and assisting others as they ended their physical journeys on earth

I am the Founder of Herstory Network. I chose the name because one day I realized that even the name history has ‘his’ in it and is overwhelmingly about males. I was delighted to make up the word ‘herstory’ until I went online and discovered that I didn’t make it up at all, it was a term coined during the women’s movement in the 1960’s. I still love the name though, so I kept it.

This is the second launch of this website. It first launched in 2011, but it caught a bug and went down several years ago. I should write that I took this time off to focus more on writing the blog post section of the site, but that is mostly a lie. The truth is my life completely fell apart for several years. Everything that I considered my foundation, what made me who I am, anything that helped me feel like a ‘somebody’, cracked and crumbled beneath my feet. I lost everything, and in those years of loss I knew despair in all her forms. But in that despair I found a part of myself that had been missing for most of my life. She was always in there, but I learned early on how to couch her language and muzzle her spontaneous feelings in order to receive the love and approval of others I so desperately craved.  While I have always had a rebel heart, I kept her on a very short leash because I had learned at a young age how to gauge the expectations of those around me and do my best to satisfy them. Now I’m old enough to know that I spent a tragic amount of time and energy anticipating everyone else’s needs, while being rewarded by religion and society for denying my own.

I’m trying really hard to change that, not just for me but for all of us. Most importantly, for the young women who come after us. I believe we made a soul promise to them to make things better for them as they come of age, and relaunching this website is part of my keeping that promise.

I’m old enough and seasoned enough to no longer care what people think of me. Maybe that too, is a lie. Maybe I will always care, but I’ve learned enough by now to not let that caring influence the decisions I make or the truths I promise to tell.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and for coming to my website. My goal is that through these writings and videos we will find each other and rethink the way women are to exist in this world. May we truly support each other and shake loose of outdated beliefs and rules that have kept us small and questioning ourselves. Because when the women unite…watch out! That’s when the magic begins…..so let’s begin.