Humility & Extroversion

Sunday 16 September 2007

Hello,

My name is Elizabeth Looney. You don’t know me, exactly, but I saw your name through a mutual friend (Collette Hellenkamp), and wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed The Book of Mev.

I worked on staff last year in El Salvador with the Casa de la Solidaridad study abroad program (which is how I know Collette,) and especially enjoyed reading the book while I was there in that context.

I’ve been thinking these past few days about how I found Mev’s story inspiring, and what I came up with was this:

I liked the balance Mev struck between being an extroverted go-getter, and being humble. In my mind, the two were always mutually exclusive of one another. I found it hard to reconcile those two qualities in a single personality, as if being humble meant being quiet all the time!

On the back of The Struggle is One in Mev’s photo her hair is sort of all over the place, her smile is earnest, and it looks as if that (being recognition) was really one of the last things she thought about that day. To me, especially as a woman, that is humble.

Yet you wrote in your memoir that Mev could often be found “among the movers and the shakers” — like the Pope, and Gustavo Gutierrez, for example!– which tells me that she not afraid to use her voice. She went after things, put herself out there and was heard.

On reflection, I thought it really beautiful how she embodied those two assets: humility and extroversion. Her example solves a dilemma I had about how to be in the world (or at least shows it is possible). To draw from a Maryanne Williamson poem, it gives me permission to do the same.

As I’m sure many people have, I found Mev’s story really inspiring, and the courage I imagine it must have taken to publish it. In short, I just wanted to say thanks.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Looney

Elizabeth graduated from the University of San Francisco in 2006 and is now pursuing an M.A. program in Community Social Psychology at the University of Massachusetts.