becoming a self in history, becoming a self in my street
Marcia Torres
Marcia is from Venezuela. She was twenty-eight when I heard her story. She
came from a family where the adults were so vulnerable themselves that they couldn’t be nurturing parents.
Marcia worked in an ice-cream shop and loved mountain biking. Her only security was her work and her
boyfriend Sandro. She told me that she and all her friends had no personal dreams. Instead they watched
American soap operas all the time. They existed only to make enough money and to live through these make-
believe worlds.
This period of her life came to an abrupt end when Sandro was killed in an
accident.
No longer able to cope with her life in Venezuela, Marcia looked on the internet
to find a place to work in Britain. She chose a community in Sussex that was inspired by the work of Rudolf
Steiner, of whom Marcia had never heard. From there she found out about the existence of eurythmy — a form
of movement inspired by Steiner. Although she did not have a penny to her name, nor any security, she
applied to study eurythmy in a small school in the West Midlands in England. She has pursued this training
ever since, working every spare hour to fund her existence.
Marcia attended an event where she
saw some of these stories. Afterwards she came home with me and told me her story. She asked if it was
possible to translate the stories into Spanish and to take the exhibition back to Venezuela. She said she herself
had been caught in a kind of hypnosis that was only broken by the death of her boyfriend. This had been hard
but it had meant that she had had the chance to find her own life and her own story. She wanted to show this
work to her old friends in the hope that they too would respond to it, and that they could discover that their
lives were significant and worth searching for.