makes others comfortable.”
I said, “I barely know her.”
She said, “But you do know yourself.”
I said, “What if I leave for her and this isn’t even real?”
She looked at me. She did not say anything.
We sat together in the quiet. She held my hand, lightly, lovingly.
I said, “I am real. What I feel and want and know. That’s all real.”
“Yes,” Liz said. “You are real.”
It is a blessing to know a free woman. Sometimes she will stop by and hold up a mirror for you. She will help you remember who you are.
Recently, my friend Erika called my cell phone. I will never understand why people insist upon calling my cell phone. It’s such an aggressive action to take: calling someone. Each time my phone rings, I have a heart attack like my pocket’s on fire and a tiny siren is going off.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to address texting. Texting = Better Than Calling. Unless.
Unless you are one of those people who doles out texts like IOUs. Unless you believe that whenever you feel like it, you can just poke at me, ping me, jump into my day like Hiiiiii and feel so entitled to a response that the next time I see you, you will arrange your face in an injured manner and say quietly, “Hey. You doing okay? I just never heard back…” At this moment, I have 183 unread texts. Texts are not the boss of me, and neither is anybody who texts me. I have decided, once and for all, that just because someone texts me does not obligate me to respond. If I believed differently, I’d walk around all day feeling anxious and indebted, responding instead of creating. Now that we’ve established why I have no friends, let’s return to Erika.
Erika and I went to college together. She was a born artist, but studied business because her mother was a corporate executive and wanted Erika to become one, too. Erika resented every minute she spent in those business classes. It’s nearly impossible to blaze one’s own path while following in someone else’s footsteps.
Erika returned to our dorm each day and recovered from her business boredom by painting. She graduated with a business degree, then fell in love with a fantastic guy and worked in a corporate office to put him through medical school. Next, the babies came, and she quit her job to stay home and care for them. All the while, she heard a voice nagging her to start painting again. One day, she told me she planned to honor that longing—to honor herself—by enrolling in art school. I heard fizz and fire in her voice for the first time in a decade.
So I answered the phone in celebration of Erika’s commitment and I said, “Hey! How is school going?”
She was quiet for a moment and then said, “Oh that. That was silly. Brett is so busy, and the kids need me. Art school just seemed so selfish after a while.”
Why do women find it honorable to dismiss ourselves?
Why do we decide that denying our longing is the responsible thing to do?
Why do we believe that what will thrill and fulfill us will hurt our people?
Why do we mistrust ourselves so completely?
Here’s why: Because our culture was built upon and benefits from the control of women. The way power justifies controlling a group is by conditioning the masses to believe that the group cannot be trusted. So the campaign to convince us to mistrust women begins early and comes from everywhere.
When we are little girls, our families, teachers, and peers insist that our loud voices, bold opinions, and strong feelings are “too much” and unladylike, so we learn to not trust our personalities.
Childhood stories promise us that girls who dare to leave the path or explore get attacked by big bad wolves and pricked by deadly spindles, so we learn to not trust our curiosity.
The beauty industry convinces us that our thighs, frizz, skin, fingernails, lips, eyelashes, leg hair, and wrinkles are repulsive and must be covered and manipulated, so we learn to not trust the bodies we live in.
Diet culture promises us that controlling our appetite is the key to our worthiness, so we learn to not trust our own hunger.
Politicians insist that our judgment about our bodies and futures cannot be trusted, so our own reproductive systems must be controlled by lawmakers we don’t know in places we’ve never been.
The legal system proves to us again and