Unless we understand our lives as a kind of autobiography in the making, we’re likely to take refuge in other people’s stories, in ready-made ideologies, and in unexamined systems of belief. — SCOTT LONDON

As I’ve mentioned before, to get to the true meaning of empowerment, I focused on the inverse of its prefix -em: me. Grammatically, me is a pronoun and functions as the objective case of I. In other words, the main difference between the two pronouns is that I is a subject pronoun and me is an object pronoun.

As you will see, me is not only a first-singular object pronoun; it can also serve as an acronym. I emphasize me first to remind us of the importance of our uniqueness and the need for self-knowledge and principled action, as we navigate relationships with others. You might remember from middle school a subject pronoun can replace the noun—person, place, or thing—performing the action—verb—in any sentence. For example, I electrically shocked my students. An object pronoun, on the other hand, may replace a sentence’s direct object, indirect object, or the object of the preposition. The object pronoun receives the action of the verb or shows the result of the action. It’s not “me ran” but “my students ran to me.” The object pronoun, me, receives the action of the running students.

While drier than un-buttered cornbread, these linguistic details are important because my combination of “Me Power” is grammatically incorrect. I’m calling out these technicalities because I took what on the surface looks like a prefix, -em, flipped it into a personal pronoun, me, and created “(Our) Me Power”: a concept that is a noun, not an overused verb implicating people as passive recipients.

Me represents the first person singular so the individual starts with himself or herself. Yet, Me Power doesn’t stop at the individual and is not a silo based on some narcissistic conceptualization of inner power.

Unlike empowerment’s denotative meaning, I argue…