A Special Place for Women

Sometimes, to make something strong, we have to tear out the rot in the foundation and start again.

I understood that to be a woman in the world was to spend so much time trying to act the right way. Be loud enough, but not too loud. Stand up for yourself, but pleasantly. Beauty was everything, but you shouldn’t rely on your looks. Always, always I was trying to get it right, to find the valance, but here around this circle, naked but not sexualized, together we could flail and scream and open ourselves raw without worrying about anything else at all. We were powerful and free, and I felt like I had when I went skinny-dipping for the first time: I was moving through something larger than myself, but also I was part of it, no parries between us.

Sympathy is nice and necessary when it's fresh. But if you leave it out too long, it curdles like old milk.

All in all, my body and I were like coworkers. I appreciated when it performed well, I got annoyed about all the skills it lacked, and I didn't want to have to see it on nights and weekends.

There is a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women. —Madeleine Albright

Well, she said she couldn't stay long because she had to feed Anais, and I asked if that was her dog, but no. It's her emotional support snake.

Wealth isn't some marker of superiority. It's a matter of luck and circumstance, and those with power using it to keep everyone else down.

Do you remember the kind of fear that you felt as a child, when you had the sense that anything was possible? Ghosts might be lingering in the shadows. A hand could reach out from underneath your bed and drag you down. Perhaps a vampire lurked in your attic, waiting for the moment when you were alone and defenseless to bare his fangs. As a grown woman, I had plenty to fear in the real world-a man walking too close behind me at night, a man yelling hateful things in people’s faces on the subway, a man coming through my window or revealing his true colors or doing any number of things.

Fill my lungs up with the that sweet, sweet city smog and let me suffocate in a place with bodegas.

Their clubhouse was reserved for more secretive things. Worshipping one another’s menstrual blood or sitting around feeling smug about their success while professing to feel concerned about the world.