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What are we risking by speaking up? Everything, certainly. But the far riskier business is not speaking up at all.
The ability to persist is often a greater indicator of success in this field than raw talent.
Your voice is powerful. Your voice has meaning. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t work so hard to try to silence you.
I’d soon realize persistence wasn’t an endgame. It was the name of the road.
So this yearning remained—I wanted somebody who was good, really good, way, way more experienced than me to tell me I was good. To reach out and pluck me from the fray and shake my hand and go: YOU ARE THE ONE. It’s a typical kid fantasy.
Many more are quite happy to rip you down and shit on you. It means you have to work harder. It means you need to be eight times as good as everyone else just to stand out. It sucks. It’s challenging. It can wear you down.
you need to endure.
For a while I became smitten with the idea of “power feminism” or the popular “lean in” culture that passes for mainstream white feminism right now. We just needed to be smarter, faster, better. We needed to ask for raises, demand better treatment. Sexism was our fault, for buying into the misogyny ourselves, and operating like we were at a disadvantage.
It doesn’t always mean “Burn it all down.” It means this piece is broken and needs to be addressed. And if you’re willing to live with that broken piece, it means owning up to it, saying yes, I know it’s damaging to people, and I own that.
I’m not a bit player in a monster’s story. But with narratives like this perpetuated across our media, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how my obituary read: a catalogue of the men who sired me, and fucked me, and courted me. Stories that are not my own. Funny, isn’t it? The power of story. It’s why I picked up a pen. I slay monsters, too.
Because women, in many cultures—and in the history of many cultures—are seen as commodities.
I want to be special, but not so special that nobody loves me. I am equal, right, so why do I still feel like I have to be married or partnered or buried in children in order to be a real person?
