I'll Have What She's Having

by Chelsea Handler

She will be the baddest. The best kind of bad. A matriarch. This woman I’ll become, she will never be silent.

I babysat for Jeremy for the next three summers until he was seventeen and I was thirteen.

To know that every feeling passes, and that no moment in time is permanent, and that the truest version of who we all are is confident, hopeful, and resilient.

so I just stopped socializing so much, and I started hanging out alone. There was a woman I had to find.

My dogs have never respected me, and after a while that in itself starts to feel like abuse. I wish I could write them a letter like I wrote my family.

“Oh, shut up, Roy,” I snapped back, exhausted. “You try raising two dogs as a single mother on one income.”

“I can’t,” I told him, and then leaned in and whispered, “It’s best that I keep my sunglasses on. Out of respect. I’m very stoned…on pot.” His eyes widened, and a smile of recognition came over his face before we were rudely interrupted by Sissy.

I had opted out of this activity, mostly because I am sane, and also because I was on ecstasy at the time.

When men realize you don’t need anything from them, they have trouble recognizing their own added value.

Since I have my own money, my own life, and a career that keeps me busy, I am really only accepting relationship candidates who are not a subtraction. I need someone who is going to add something I don’t already have—like the love and consideration that a partner can bring.

Someone I didn’t have to shrink myself for, or worry about emasculating. I had finally found my person, and this meant the universe had my back.

When he loves you, it feels like the entire sun is shining down on you.

I am here for a reason, and I had forgotten what that reason was, and how powerful my voice could be.

The shrill cries from grown middle-aged white men about my choosing not to procreate should be a gift to men. After all, I’m saving all men from another incarnation of me.

With regard to race, feminism, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, poor people, education, there is an unwritten understanding among the world’s most powerful men that all of these groups will be better off and perform more dutifully with a foot on their neck.

To know that I will land on my feet. To trust myself. That is what freedom means to me.

What freedom means to me is to be able to soar like an eagle when I want to fly, and to be able to wrap myself in bed for days in a row if that’s what I need.

I am here for women; that is my purpose. I am here to lift, to inspire, and to listen. There is not a woman in need that I wouldn’t try to help pull out of whatever hole she is in to help lift her up.

I’ve had trouble with men my whole life. Either they want to control me, or they are repelled by my unwillingness to be controlled. Regardless, they have been a problem for me for quite some time.