There will be a young woman searching for herself online today. She’ll be looking for the words that breathe life into emotions she’s previously been unable to name. She’ll be looking for a community of women like her, who look like her, who’ll help her construct a healthy image of herself. She’ll be scrolling through articles and think pieces, news and opinion, trying to understand better how women like her survive in the world. And despite an investigative deep-dive into the internet, she’ll likely come up empty handed. She’ll feel invisible. She’ll feel that women like her, who think and feel and love like her, don’t have a place or aren’t as valued. She’ll wonder what it means that all the lesbians she finds are white, with short hair and glasses, and why there appears to be only two real ways to be a lesbian woman. She’ll look at herself in the mirror and wonder what she should change about herself to it in, to be represented, to be considered desirable. She’ll frown at what she sees because what she sees is not, apparently, what the world wants to see. I still remember what it felt like when I first discovered other women like me, women who were fighting against the odds to raise a child, who were also struggling to keep their head above water. Women who found time to explore their depths as they worked to keep everything together on the surface.
Whether Audre Lorde or Ksenia Boom, older or more recent discoveries, reading the stories of women like me has helped me feel less alone in the world, less unsure what to do with all this woman. In a world dominated by men, reading the stories of women like me has ignited a radical reimagining of what my present and future will look like, what this world could look like for my daughter. And when the world becomes so completely overwhelming, when the work in front of me feels too big to ever finish, there is always available to me the story of a woman sharing her insights into what happens when we press on, or a story about how it’s ok to step back. There’s collected wisdom on saying “no”, demanding more and never accepting less.