To Be a Woman

What the hell does that actually mean?

Photo: Perazna

I’m at my gate in the Frankfurt airport. There’s an elderly woman doing Qi Gong barefoot, unbothered by all of us staring. That is the gift of aging. We don’t lose appeal—we lose the need to explain ourselves. It’s not that we no longer care; we simply care about things that are meaningful to us. I’ve never seen a crone try to earn her right to be on the planet.

I board the plane. I’m sitting in my seat, which offers 17 inches of personal space. Another woman squeezes in next to me. We don’t speak the same language, but I notice her palms shaking at takeoff. We exchange a look, and I silently offer my hand. She grips it until we’re well above the clouds and the turbulence ends. I never learned her name. I get my period a week early on the flight and have no supplies with me. I ask the flight attendant if they have anything at all, and she pops open her purse, handing me a tampon without hesitation.

I have found a transient home in the arms of many women across the world.

Photo: Perazna

At our best, we love each other the way wolves do—without hesitation. Unguarded, fierce, protective, and with a primal understanding of one another’s experience. We know what it means to stand in the center of our own chaos every day and not succumb to the storm brewing beneath our skin. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made a new woman friend, and within thirty minutes, we’ve covered our childhood, our most agonizing heartbreak, and the love we hope to call in.

It is a gift to love unguarded in this way—one that must be protected.

My birthday is on International Women’s Day. When I reflect on the person I’ve become, it is because I have been fortunate to have wonderful women in my life ever since I was a girl.

At eighteen years old, I signed up to become a craniosacral therapist. It was a nine-month-long intensive training taught by a brilliant healer named Angelica Singh. The other women in the group were anywhere from their thirties to their sixties. After hearing my age, she almost didn’t let me in. Who was this doe-eyed fetus wanting to learn about trauma when she had just become legally allowed to vote?

To her credit, she let me do it. I spent nine months in a container with these women for hours each day, learning about traumatic imprints. But the greatest gift of that training was the time I got to spend learning from Angelica and the women around me, who spanned so many generations. I did not realize how important it is to have mentors who initiate us into our womanhood or manhood. I wonder if that plays into the collective feeling in the West that something is missing.

Photo of four generations of women in my family.

Every day, we women have to steal our beauty back from the world.

We are not taught that our bodies are beautiful because they are animated by our spirit. We are not taught that we do not have to earn love—it is a gift. We are not taught that we belong to ourselves and to each other.

Imagine if women decided they belong to each other—all of us. Instead of gossip, we guard our secrets. Instead of denying our age, we celebrate the changing seasons. Instead of despair, we lift our knees from the ground and let the sorrow pass through our dancing bodies.

Cheers to the women of the world. To me, you are the greatest wonder.

This is a poem I wrote a few years ago for the occasion.

I have known women who have given up every comfort to dance alone under the night sky, unbothered by watchful eyes. Women who have stolen moments from their busy lives just to create—to sit at the pottery wheel and feel worlds of clay spin beneath their fingertips. I have known women who will put on red lipstick just to write and seduce the muse. I have known women who have sacrificed their sanity, clawed tooth and nail not just to climb toward success, but to disrupt the system altogether with a wicked grin on their faces.

I have known women who have said to hell with your timelines and pressures—who have chosen a quiet life of growing herbs in the woods with wild, unruly hair. I have known women who have tipped their heads back and howled in triumph as they gave birth, bringing life into the world while fighting an illness. I have known soft women and strong women and beautiful women and smart women—women who have walked through the hell within themselves and emerged with fire in their eyes, knowing heaven was in their wild hearts the whole time. Women who remind me what it means to be a woman.

Xx,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Scribe.