What It Means to Be a Woman Today
On grief, power, and why defeat is not an option
I have always been devoted to women. To the support of them, the advocacy of them, the fierce and unwavering belief in them.
And of course, I am one.
But I have never felt what it means to be a woman as viscerally as I do right now. In my bones. In that place where love and grief live side by side.
It is both magical and painful. Sometimes in the same breath.
I watch what is happening in the world and part of me wants to crumble. The inequity. The diminishment. The casual, systemic, sometimes violent way women are treated as less than. The sexism that masquerades as tradition. The misogyny that dresses itself up as strength. The abuse, the neglect, the harm that women absorb daily, quietly, because what other choice do they have?
It is almost too much to bear witness to.
I did not arrive at this beautiful age of 58 without my own "me too" moments. Not one. Not two. More than I care to count and more than I ever fully named out loud.
In fact, I do not know a single woman, of any age, who has not been made to feel scared, small, uncomfortable, or unsafe by a man at some point in her life. Not one. And most of those women have never told anyone. Not their fathers. Not their partners. Not their friends or their employers. They simply hold it, deep in the body, in a place where you put things that are too heavy to carry and too dangerous to put down.
We have all learned to hold things that should never have been ours to carry.
If you are a woman today, your rights are being challenged. In some places, taken. In others, debated by people who will never be affected by the outcome.
If you are a woman today, you have to read things that are simply unreadable. Stories of girls, children, abused in ways the mind refuses to process. You carry those stories because you cannot unsee them, and because somewhere in you, you know they are connected to everything.
If you are a woman today, you are expected to hold everyone together while sometimes quietly falling apart. You are the one who remembers. The one who checks in. The one who carries the invisible weight of everyone else's needs while your own wait patiently, indefinitely, in a corner.
If you are a woman today, you are tired in a way sleep does not fix.
And still.
Still, I need you to hear this: you are magical. Not in some soft, decorative way. Magical in the way that is fierce and ancient and undeniable.
We have endured all of this. All of it. And we still hold up the sky.
You hold more power than you have been given permission to use. And this moment is asking you, demanding you, to activate it in ways you maybe haven't before.
You are brilliant. You are beautiful. You are bold and brave in measures you have not yet fully acknowledged in yourself.
The world wants us to surrender. To accept that this is our place. That this is simply how things are, how they have always been, how they will remain.
I am not accepting that. I hope you won't either.
But I want to be clear about something, because it matters: I know extraordinary men. I am married to one. I have raised two. My father is another. This is not a war against men.
But we are discovering, right now, in real time, that the world desperately needs what women carry. The balance. The civility. The compassion. The care. The kind of love that has backbone and still makes room for everyone at the table. We are not a nice-to-have, we are a necessity this world has been dangerously undervaluing.
If you are like me, you oscillate. Inspired one moment, flattened the next. Lit up with purpose in the morning and exhausted by grief by afternoon.
I hear you. I am right there with you.
But I need to say this as clearly as I know how: defeat is not an option.
You must take care of yourself. Not as a luxury, as a strategy. This is a marathon, and you cannot run it on empty. Rest is not retreat. Rest is preparation.
Stay focused on the end goal: to right this terrible imbalance. To dismantle what has diminished us for far too long. To build something better, not just for ourselves, but for every girl who comes behind us.
This is on us. On you and on me. To stay steadfast in our values. To refuse to normalize what is not normal. To remind each other, again and again, that none of this is okay. That it never was.
I know how much it hurts to watch your sisters suffer. I know the particular ache of being the ones who care for everyone and still being treated as though we matter less. I know the exhaustion of having to explain, again, why this is serious, why this is urgent, why we cannot afford to look away.
Our power is threatening to those who benefit from our smallness.
Too bad.
Walk in your power anyway. Turn up your light. Amplify your joy, because joy is not frivolous right now; it is radical. Lead with your wisdom, because the world is desperate for it even when it pretends otherwise.
We are in this together. The grief and the magic both. The exhaustion and the fire both. The heartbreak and the unshakeable belief that we are capable of changing this.
I love you all so much. More than I know how to say.
Rise up. Resist. Rest. Remain.
And know that I am right here beside you.
