Last Sunday, the shy little girl who was too scared to raise her hand in class and use her voice, the young woman so hampered by shame for decades that she kept silent, won the award for best voiceover in a documentary at the New Bedford Film Festival.

I am profoundly moved that my voice was heard. That my voice and my story made a difference.

As I walked up the aisle through the theatre to receive the award for “Perpetual,”  an enthusiastic woman in the audience shouted: “ You just beat Liam Neeson” who was another nominee in the category.

To be recognized for my authenticity was affirming. To be rewarded for this different expression of storytelling was gratifying.

It was also an affirmation that it is never too late for any of us to speak up, to tell our stories, and expand ourselves in the ways we want to share them.

That is the takeaway and hope I want to share with all of you.

The positive news continued.

Sally Edelstein, “NYC Subway 1978 gauche, watercolor, pencil

The following day, I was notified by American Illustrator that an illustration of mine was selected  for this years prestigious American Illustration Annual. An annual that exhibited the top illustrators in the field.

I was not only thrilled. I was floored. I had made it through over 8,000 entries.

Several months ago on a whim, I submitted a piece I created awhile back, in the hopes that I might gain acceptance in a field that I not only loved and longed for,  but had left behind some years ago.

This was going back to my first form of storytelling. Not only illustrating but painting. As my own life began fracturing, my form of artistic expression reflected that. I would tell my stories in collage. My sense of myself as a painter dimmed, nearly diminished.

It is why this recognition was particularly primal for me

Learning of these back-to-back wins, an enthusiastic friend  generously commented, “Is there anything you can’t do?”

Without missing a beat, I immediately responded “I can’t sew.”

On the heels of these 2 positive recognitions, it was hard not to go back to 1968 when I was humiliated for not being able to sew, a skill that at the time was presented as one that might well hamper and doom me for life if I could master it.

When I entered junior high in 1968, I was required to take home economics, a class I ended up hating nearly as much as gym. Although the burgeoning women’s liberation movement had begun calling into question the role of women, this antiquated class was nothing short of basic training for being a successful wife and homemaker. But when it came to stitching and stirring, I was a flop.

While the teenage boys in my grade got sent off to shop class to work with wood, girls were learning how to bake the flakiest, most perfect biscuit sure to win a man’s heart. Having grown up in a household with a mother who ascribed to the ethos of new and improved—the take-a-can-and-take-it-easy school of cooking—my only reference to biscuit making was banging open a can of frozen pre-sliced biscuits courtesy of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Slice, bake and call it a day.

Not a fan of recipes, I mixed and measured as carefully as I could, but it was clear I would never measure up. My biscuits never did seem to rise to the occasion.

A So So Sewer

I fared no better in the much-despised sewing portion of the class.

In spite of the fact that I was an artist with well-developed motor skills, a needle and thread was my downfall. Sewing machines were as foreign to me as a lawnmower and neither held any interest. The final project, which required me to sew an A-line skirt from a dreary Butterick pattern, ended in disaster as I ultimately stapled and glued the entire thing together rather than use a dreaded sewing machine.

Exasperated, my home economics teacher rolled her watery eyes shrouded in lime green eyeshadow and reprimanded me. Shaking her head in disgust, I will never forget being told in front of the class by this plump woman with a sloppy beehive hairdo and a cardigan with a frayed sleeve: “I hope you can do something because you certainly can’t sew.”

Painfully shy and mortified to be criticized so publicly while encircled by popular girls with Breck-perfect hair, my face bloomed to a deep shade of crimson. If only I could have twitched my nose like Samantha Stevens transporting me anywhere but that dusty rose classroom. I felt myself shrinking, following a pattern so familiar to women.

Later that afternoon I rode my Schwinn bicycle to the local Bobby Kennedy for President headquarters where I volunteered after school, working on his campaign. As I stuffed envelopes, licking the roll of 6 cents stamps till my tongue dried out, I knew, somewhere deep inside I could indeed do a lot more than sew a hem. There was more than something I could do!

I now  know I may never be a sewer but there certainly is something I can do,