Being a woman

My one advice to women everywhere is to be a person. Just be a person. Before being a woman. It's great to embrace your womanhood, but before you do that, just stop and be a human being. Question the way you look at yourself. Question the things you take for granted, the things you expect, the things you accept. You are not your mistakes any more than anyone else is. You are also not who you date, how you dress and definitely not the shape of your body or the texture of your skin. It's a great thing to take care of yourself, but that shouldn't be the purpose of your existence. That shouldn't be why you get up in the morning. You don't owe beauty to anyone but yourself. Just go out and live life and make mistakes and learn and be hurt and grow and please, please, create something! Invest in who you are. There is too much pressure to look a certain way to allow you the freedom to spend time on other things. Do not let that happen. Crow's feet are good. They tell a story of a life well-laughed at. Smudged mascaras are good because they say that you lived intensely. Do not pull up the glass on a sunny day. Lose the complexion. Gain the kiss of the sun and the wind on your face. Get dirty. Clean up later. There is so much of life to live and it's so insane to waste the chance to live it!

So, that is why I write. To give everything a sense of meaning. To be understood, in whatever broken way, by whoever has taken the time to read the words that flow out of my mind. To feel that what I think and know and believe matters. That it is not insane to want a world that is better and kinder. That it is not utterly impractical to want to have a life around my own ideals and to not want to slit the throats of all the dreams I have grown up with for the idea of a 'working' thing. I write because I want my words to 'work' too. I write because I need you, whoever you are, to know that I care. That I get angry and disappointed in the world sometimes, and that sometimes, I have doubted everything that I am, and that I have almost killed the real me for the idea of someone I am not, in the pursuit of a life that was never mine.That I still, after everything, somehow, hopelessly and inexplicably, believe.