I want you to have hope

through it all, women are the epitome of tenderness and we bring it with us wherever we go

As a child, I have a quiet defiance about me. My mom recites the endless stories of the never-sleeping Sam, playing with my dolls all through the night while sitting up in bed. I want to tie my own shoes, put on my own jacket. I want to play in the woods long after the sun goes down, even though you give a curfew when the sun sinks below the trees. I capture frogs from the creek and name them, even when you wince. I mix the wrong colors during art class because I can. I push boundaries, I break rules, I make up my own worlds, I find them to be fascinating to live in.

I try to remember the turning point. The fork in the road between that girl, and me. It’s easier to pinpoint than I think.

One day, you’re late, and briskly walking between buildings to your 6th grade classes— and in an instant— you learn just how quickly someone can overpower you. You never even gave a thought to why someone would. The pavement hurts and is covered in ice. The walk between classes becomes a transition between lives.

Life gets ahold of little girls like me and shakes up that quiet defiance. It doesn’t take long for it to rescind.

This is not a unique story, I’m afraid. Ask the women in your life to tell you when the world changed them, and it will be more brutal than you think.

Little Sam stayed down on the ice that day. A switch was flipped.

Suddenly I’m fearful of the darkness in my own bedroom… the familiar shadows of its corners have transformed into something I cannot recognize. As the sun sets, I race back to the house to beat the impending glow of night. I stop catching fireflies and the frogs remain in the creek. My pace quickens when I am alone, I become familiar with the throb of my heartbeat in my throat. I make decisions governed around keeping my world as safe and as small as possible. I stop mixing the colors. I no longer lose my way in the woods willingly, because I stop going outside. My yearning dissipates, and with it, my subtle life force.

For nearly 20 years after I began locking the windows and doors, I was living for anyone other than myself. I didn’t know I had a self to protect or care for. I had left her there, on the ice that day, unable to coax her back into her body. There are very few memories as vivid as that one.

Within these lost years of my life, there were still moments of joy and discovery. But it was impossible to penetrate the surface of my life by allowing my fear of the world to run the show. Fear was my entire existence… a subtle pulse beneath the surface I could never quite put a finger on.

Until I woke up.

The pain became inescapable, and I had to sit long and hard with the girl I had left behind. I had no choice but to end it— to leave the relationship, leave the career, leave behind and grieve the idea of my life. It was excruciating.

It also eradicated my fear.

Fear no longer dictates the way I operate in this life. There was a time when fear sat in the drivers seat of my existence. I made decisions based on what others would think of me. I stayed small in harmful relationships. I stayed in my comfort zone because the world was too big. I believed “it’s just how the world works” when I was harmed or something felt wrong or not aligned. I swallowed my pain, my resentment, my anger, my discontent…. because fear told me it was how it had to be.

My life is now governed by my intuition, and my endless thirst for empathy and curiosity. I am a seeker. Just as I was as a little girl. My life now is catered to her, no longer allowing the world to swell my fear. I stop to witness the frogs in the pond. I don’t hide my tears when feeding the stray cats behind my apartment. When I’m triggered, I do everything in my power to turn inward. I no longer turn away from my “dirty pain”. I’m curious about it. I want to know where it comes from, and how to nurture the part of myself that is not founded on ego. There is endless learning and unlearning involved. There is a lot of looking in the mirror. Shame gremlins come up, anger surfaces, depression swallows the room.

But now, even in my deepest, most disorienting forms of sadness, hopelessness, or rage— I’m no longer allowing fear to dictate how I walk through the world. Fear will never be my outlook, ever again. Fear took too much life away from me before. I know now to welcome its presence, rather than work my life around it. You can be there, fear, but you cannot dictate.

Not in my relationships, not in the relationship I have with myself, not in my career or life path, not in my healing, not in my humanity with the collective, and absolutely not within my Vote.

Working through fear is resistance.

There is a magic there, within that work. One I’m now understanding is very rare and special. It can become natural to want to harm after being harmed. It is easier to lose tenderness when the world has showed you the darkest parts of itself. Nurturing that tenderness is the magic.

Women have an alchemy this world has not been prepared to witness until now.

Do you understand what would happen if a woman told the truth about her life? No, not the gentle-toned, palatable version that would be comfortable for you. The whole, unbearable to look at kind of truth. What if she allowed every experience to shape and outweigh her tenderness, her ability to forgive and become so much more than all of this violence?

The entire world would crumble. I can’t help but think that maybe it’s time. Women are the seekers, those who cannot be repressed by fear.

We are born to approach fear and dissect it. We are the catalysts for hope.

It is seen in the way we continue to approach and contribute to a world that is so eager to judge, dismiss, degrade, assault and minimize us. Can’t you see our hope lives on greater than any other force in this life?

It is found in the way we are thought leaders and providers for a better world, even with a wage gap and medical systems in which our bodies are not accounted for. We step into the work place, knowing full-well that 1 in 3 of us will experience harassment. That it will be his word over ours. That there are protections for others and never for us. Our hope is alive and well in the way we date an ex-lover who swears he’s changed, to cradle his insecurities and debilitating habits until the pain becomes our own. To give up our youth for men who never quite measure up, to remain neutral when bargaining with the cost of it all.

Our hope is with us when we say ‘yes’ and ‘I do’ at the altar, even knowing that 38% of women will die by the hands of their intimate partner. We lay beside you and tell you our deepest fears, our deepest secrets, our dreams for a better world. We pretend not to notice when you try a little less at loving us as whole, complex human. Our hope begs us to hold out. We soon learn that hope truly means loving ourselves, first.

That same hope is seen in the way we decide to try again for another child, after losing the one before her, and losing our way back. The hope that swells when our bodies are ravaged and broken by bringing life into this world, for the sake of love and all things greater than us. Hope is the way we bravely decide that being a mother isn’t in our life path, because there are other ways to serve our maternal energy.

It is in the way we create the art through times of despair, the time we put into bagging groceries for our best friend who cannot get out of bed, the voice that asks “are you okay?” to the stranger crying on the sidewalk. Our hope is the smile to the toddler at the store, our attendance at the therapy appointment, the donation to the sick dog who comes across our TikTok feed. Our hope is taking to the streets to protest for children across the globe that we will never meet, the smile at the start of the work meeting while facing our abuser, the first box carried into an empty apartment as we begin a new life. It is ever-present and moving through us, no matter how cynical or exhausted we feel.

When the world informs women they are dramatic for not wanting a rapist President, when the world mentions economics at the cost of women losing the right to their own bodily autonomy, when the world discounts all of the pain and harm it perpetuates and attempts to shove us all back down— to force us to remain terrified little girls on the ice, cold and alone—

Hope runs through us like a subdued current, eager to prevail.

That little girl-turned-woman has experienced many awful betrayals alongside the one between classes that day at the start of 6th grade. And even still— I walk through the world protecting a kernel of hope so bright and so eager— that no form of harm, no form of fear, and no form of downright hate… could ever dream of nearing it.

Now, as a 33-year-old woman, I hold space for little me, and her subtle defiance that would grow into something much bigger than she ever knew possible.

My greatest act of defiance in this world is my Hope. I now recognize it in every woman around me, flickering in resistance.

I hope you get the chance to vote with yours, too.