Women: Thank you

Women: Thank you

“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”
-Bell Hooks

 

I’d like to take this time to say thank you to women and girls; everywhere, from every walk, of any and every identity and orientation, of every experience, past and present. Thank you for your fight and your love, for your contributions and your sacrifices. Here’s to you. Here’s to us. To the fed-up and the tired, the scared and the hiding, the activists, to the women and girls who still believe it’s their job to perform conventional femininity and gender in exchange for male acceptance, to the sex workers, the Queen Bitches, the nonconformists, the people-pleasers, to the women who believe that we aren’t supposed to need anything, to the women who provide and meet needs and nurture and care and allow themselves to receive, to the women who provide and meet needs and nurture and care and don’t receive or cannot allow themselves to receive, to the loud and proud, to the silent and ashamed, to the women who have complicated relationships with womanhood, the mentors, the novices, to the women who embrace their sexuality and the women who haven’t felt safe embracing their sexuality, to the women who don’t give a fuck and the women who don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, the leaders and the assistants, the loudmouths, the reserved, the comfortable and the vulnerable, to the women we’ve been and the women we’re becoming, the poets and the engineers, the emotionally unbridled and the emotionally subdued, the women fighting to survive and the women who are thriving, to the ones who have elevated themselves and the ones who are heavy with burden- thank you.

How ever you Woman, I extend to you my deepest and most profound gratitude.

We are courageous. We are stronger together. We don’t always take ownership of ourselves and our experiences; we’re growing. We fight for ourselves when we fight for any of us. We resist. We love. We fight. We create. We push. We are a pantheon of voices. We are a cauldron of gifts and strengths. We expand consciousness. We risk it. We surrender to our purpose, to our love, and to our power. We have the right. We keep going. We are here.

Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for all the times you have done anything, said anything in support of us living the way we want to live. You provide hope and life and love and light. You are the reason I do what I do every day. You are my inspiration to keep connecting to my power and the reason I fight for others to connect to theirs. You are the reason we’re all still here. You are my favorite part of us. Thank you.

 

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
-Audre Lord

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie