Chapter 15: On Healing Our Wounds with the Feminine - Who Is Wellness For?

Friendships with women mean a lot to me. Historically this has always been the case. As someone who went to a public all-girls’ school, someone who has been queer since she was a teenager, I cultivated a certain kind of love of women and femme folks that was constantly being triggered and tested by my mother. I wanted to believe I could have healthy relationships with women and girls, but the person I hated the most was a woman, and her ideas of women were plagued by a simultaneous prolonged fascination and deep hatred that she had seeped into my bloodstream, haunting me with her bromides. Because no one in my family was allowed a social life, my mother made up stories about my friends. Sometimes they were funny, if she was in a good mood. With her vicious, sly, and rank type of humor, she’d make a raucous joke that would momentarily make you believe she was on your side. If she was in a bad mood, she would call my friends sluts and whores and forbid me to even talk to them at school. Still, my relationships with women in my life have also been small miracles, albeit also some of the most difficult relationships I’ve had.

Over the years, I’ve conditioned myself to be a people pleaser; when I have stopped playing that role in people’s lives, ten out of ten times I’m accused of being selfish, of being mislabeled a narcissist, of caring only for myself in the aftermath. These are words I’m familiar with. Choosing anything for myself as a child warranted being lambasted as selfish by my mother. I believed this was true until I began to live in the world and saw how other young girls lived, how they thrived, how they were treated by their mothers or families. I realized I had been duped and denied the foundational respect a child deserves for just being.

Everyone in my family has a martyr complex, so passive aggression was rampant. If you weren’t martyring your happiness for someone else, were you even a good person? This was something that lingered like a cruel sentiment in interactions with my family. We were all so depressed and incapable of knowing how to pull the other out because we were all implicated in the violence my mother spawned.

When you grow up in abuse, everything becomes part of the grooming process. Conditioning is so important, and yet we rarely fully factor it in. When Gabor Maté writes that “many people unwittingly spend their entire lives as if under the gaze of a powerful and judgmental examiner whom they must please at all costs,”^[1] what he’s identifying is abusive parenting and family dynamics that become mantras of self-policing. The mind grips on to the grooves of the language used by our parents like they are lullabies, good or bad, nightmare or dream. Nostalgia brings us back to these formative years like a lighthouse. I deserved the life I had been given, I told myself, and by witnessing the actions of my sister and my father, I believed that my duty was to give my life over to the family. Even if I was bad, by the light of my sister and father, I knew what goodness was. God felt close in those days, too, because I needed a narrative to sustain myself. I wondered if all that was happening was a test of character. I wanted to be a good girl, I wanted to be a good person for my family and for God.

Still, I fail, every day. As my female friendships in my teen years dwindled, I found I was the only one in my friend group who craved depth all the time. A lot of people call me intense, possibly because I can’t have a banal conversation, I can’t perform. I don’t understand social niceties, and I refuse to. I’m notoriously blunt, and this, alongside my kindness, can’t be understood, so I get misrepresented and mischaracterized a lot. Especially by other women. I’m sure plenty of people call me crazy. These days that brings humor more than it does pain, because the way we engage with each other is so scripted, so pathetically predictable. We are keys to each other’s liberation—why do we keep forgetting that?

As I get older, I’ve noticed I care less and less about what others think of me. I’ve found this phenomenal dance with myself, a cadence and grit, a movement of understanding that these depths I seek are available, and they are portals to get closer to myself. This has helped me ground myself in my own inner knowing and self. I guess I care less about what others think of me now because I’ve gained self-respect through this journey of healing.

But this feeling of being a social pariah, especially in relationships to other women, has developed into wanting to understand my failings. If I was the problem, I wanted to know why. I didn’t have the bravado that some have; instead I had deep insecurity and a heart so big and wanting to be seen. But I didn’t understand why it kept getting rejected or misunderstood.

In my late teens, just before I graduated high school, most of my closest girlfriends entered relationships, and I remained single. When I went to university, I was young and messy, a new flavor I’d never been allowed to try because I suddenly had freedom. I was at a loss with myself, and no matter what I did, I was unlikable. I began to disassociate again. I would lose most of my friendships mainly because I was a loner and a nonconformist. While I still craved deep friendship, the women closest to me rarely could or wanted to keep up with me. I was always the disposable one, and I got thrown out and around a lot. I was rejected for being who I am, for moving as myself. So this made me question who I was constantly, and thus made me feel more insecure, until I stopped. Until one day I just went, Nope. I’m not participating in this charade anymore. I refuse to metabolize other people’s insecurities of who I am.

Another thing about abuse is that when you haven’t articulated its parameters to yourself or to others around you, people assume you grew up in a normal environment like they did. Even if they also didn’t, they will still project normalcy onto you, and if you go off-script, my oh my are they quick to critique, torment, and laugh at you. Though many people have had shitty childhoods, there is a spectrum. It took me a long time to accept that a person can only ever meet you how deeply they meet themselves. As I grew older, I began to see how women treated me different from other women, and how often I was relegated into a role of silence or the butt of the joke. I saw how quickly, easily, other women relied on talking down to me or making me feel bad by being overly, exhaustively critical, wielding shitty comments that triggered me, once again relegating me to the role of the hurt, confused, and over-sensitive type. If I reacted—which I often did—I was castigated even more. I wasn’t liked, I assume, because I’ve never been able to fall into place. It was my fault I couldn’t get in on the joke, but I wasn’t sure why so many women had to interact with me like this, how I perpetually felt I could only be liked if I was small against someone else. If I was me, the full me, I was too big.

When I was younger there wasn’t the societal awareness we now have of trauma. Culturally things were so different, emotions were corny, and as a person with many, I realized I was better at hiding and serving. Staying quiet is a trauma response. People liked me better, too, when I was this way. When I gave more, because I took my place in the social hierarchy that was governed for me. There were a couple of years in my twenties when I thought I could get into line and just stop the restlessness by being how others wanted me to be, servile. I told myself I was worthless and that what I wanted was so impossible that I settled for people who petrified me into a perma-state of guilt. I had good friends but somehow found myself forever drained by most people. Still, I blamed it on myself, like I was the eternal problem. I funneled the frustration into my writing, thinking about all things macabre, but also, again and again, about friendships between women.

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My former friend C was a beautiful woman in a way all women want to be. Her body had a dancer’s grace, and she was quirky in a real cool girl way. We were good friends, and I had longed for her friendship as I often longed for friendships with women, especially with other women of color. Throughout our friendship, I fawned over her. Dripping with compliments and earnest observations, I quickly became a confidante, and I took the role seriously. I believed good girlfriends were truer than gold, but when one day C told me she felt jealous when people told me I was beautiful, I felt a bit off. I was the frumpy one in the friendship. I had forever been the frumpy one, incapable of self-actualizing into my body; it constantly felt like a thing outside of me. I assumed most people could read this on me, and that kept me even smaller.

My life had been forged without me for so long that by fashioning myself against the beauty of my friend, I had started to slowly feel . . . acceptable, as I had never felt myself to be. Being around her made me feel beautiful, because as I watched how she adorned herself, I started to do the same. She had known all this, known, at least on a surface level, how difficult it was for me to feel embodied. When she said those words to me, about her jealousy over a beauty I didn’t know I had, instead of feeling the full force of the fusillade, I cowered and sympathized. Truthfully, I was glad she was being honest. I thought bluntness was what garnered good relationships with women. But what she was saying was really an observation without any desire to change it. What followed was a revolution on my end. A few years later, unsurprisingly, right as my career started to finally show signs of success, this same friend accused me of being a narcissist. Up until that point I had sought counsel from her about whether to post photos of myself that I liked on my Instagram account, which up until then had been a place of jokes or photos of other things, anything but myself. If I rarely posted a selfie—it was shadowed, hidden, I was still in so much shame. But there was also an itch that was brewing, and the itch told me that I needed to start liking myself. I liked the idea of Instagram as an archive and decided I wanted to start coming to terms and like this body of mine. Photos, I figured, might be a good way to confront my dysmorphia and dysphoria. It was slow, but I wanted to like myself.

I’m not perfect, nobody is, but it has been interesting to track and observe patterns I’ve had with some of my closest friends who are women. When they have failed in the past, I often thought it was my problem; when they guilted me, spoke about me behind my back, I secretly believed that maybe I was just a shitty human who had turned people away from me. But as I grew older, maturing into myself, I realized what actually was at play was that more women than not seem to hate other women. The oversaturation of misogyny becomes known as culture. I’ve found that when triggered by other women (for their beauty, style, grace, intellect, charm), instead of relaying that information in a positive way, we are encouraged to feel threatened. I was guilty of participating in this dynamic as well. This is not surprising when you see the information we are socialized with about other women. When I started therapy, a pattern began to emerge.

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Estés writes, “When a woman has this ambivalent mother construct in her psyche, she may find herself giving in too easily; she may find herself afraid to take a stand, to demand respect, to assert her right to do it, learn it, live it in her own way.”^[2] There are many things therapy has offered me, but above all it has been a place where I’ve been able to cultivate self-confidence. I started to see how constant doubt about one’s own value is often tied to parenting. If a parent constantly tells you what you feel is wrong, then of course that’s gaslighting. These things are not just buzzwords of a zeitgeist, they actually condition you. The way I navigated the world was ruled by fear, searching for people who could protect me. I found that other women wanted my depth, but only for themselves. When I would start to need things or show any messiness—or, painfully, when my life was going superficially well—close female friendships would drop off, without a beat, blaming me for my sins, never once exacting their own. I’m not a person who hides, though I used to be. And I’ve noticed that every time I step closer into myself, even if it’s a bumpy transition, people abandon ship. Over the years, I’ve believed it was a fault of mine, but these days what I think is that for all the charade of feminism, what our society really lacks is a real love for women—how dynamic we are and how beautiful we are in all that difference. We expect our lovers to love us, but so many of us lack real love for ourselves, love that isn’t about clout, or beauty, or wealth—but a love that is deep and pure. Without conditionality.

So many of us fear that there can only be one, even if we’re actively telling ourselves otherwise, that when someone poses a threat to our understanding of ourselves (and for many of us that sense of self is built on making others feel small), we are incapable of just letting that person be. Instead, we become jealous, vindictive, and hateful. Even if it’s just in private. But this energy can be shifted into a profundity and awe for who we are and how much of this world we carry, despite existing in a world that wasn’t designed with us in mind. Isn’t it miraculous how we adapt, how we care, how we find ways to create and be? It’s important for us to reckon with how we fan the patriarchal flame when we turn from and against one another.

When I first told my therapist that I didn’t know how to love myself authentically, she told me to start respecting how hard I work at every facet of my life, not just at my professional work. I began to see she was right, and I realized, all these years as I had awaited validation from all these places—from friends, peers, institutions, lovers—when all along I could have invested in validating my own soul work. How time and time again, no matter how much I fell off the path, I still found my way back to myself. How incredible that after all these years I haven’t abandoned myself. I’m still here, trying, attempting, open-hearted.

As imperfect people, I want to understand how we can have more mercy for ourselves and others. That’s why in the last few years I have considered myself an abolitionist. As an imperfect person, I’m thinking ahead, to the future. All of us will fail at things. We will try and we will fail. We will have good intentions yet somehow not be able to show up as our full selves. I have had to remember that, and every time I feel angry about my life, I am better served by looking at things more holistically. My shame of all the things that make me “not good enough” has kept me from living a good life, a life where I feel good about myself.

I wonder: if we could hold this fact close to our hearts, could we also understand how complex other people’s lives are, and how people are going to hurt you just as you are going to hurt other people. If we could genuinely accept this, I believe we could shift in a major way. Relationships are important because in times like these, times of the apocalypse, all connection is that much more sacred, potent on an individual level. On a global, macro level, our relationships to and with each other determine our past, present, and future. Systems that have failed us and yet continue to reign—white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy—are determined by, you guessed it, relationships. Yet how often do we truly examine this very fact? How connection to each other is at the core of who we are, it’s why we turn to art, to songs and poetry, it’s why we started documenting stories on cave walls and in books. Yet we’ve filled that space to be with each other with the endless pursuit of money and racism. In times like these, dark times, as we look toward the next stage of where we are going, we will have to prioritize connectivity more.

“The fear of loss of relationships is a key way in which patriarchy holds us back,” writes Bethany Webster in Discovering the Inner Mother. “We keep our voices down, we exaggerate the truth, we manipulate to get our way, we stagnate our growth as a form of loyalty. These patterns are not a cause for self-judgment or self-blame. These are intergenerationally transmitted survival mechanisms for enduring misogyny, and a cause for self-compassion.”^[3] Women have been conditioned to hate women. We need to accept that as a fact, for revolution. Until we can unlearn and dislocate the misogyny inside of ourselves, we will continue to harbor insidious ideas about other women. And this will continue to affect relations with each other as well as the Earth.

I’ve seen this in myself, how I’m so quick to judge sometimes, but I wonder if it stems from how often I have felt people were quick to judge me. Maybe it’s still in the pain of my teenage years of being left behind for boyfriends. Insecurities and projections (both mine and others’), and not speaking of them, along with jealousy, have created an enormous amount of tension with some women in my life. I have been saddened by how I felt I was intentionally misunderstood by them, by how the violence of my early life seemed to dictate the loneliness of my adult life, and yet not a lot of people could hold how the absence of a mother sits in your body. How cold it feels, and how visceral the pain is every goddamn day. So, narratives are drawn, assumptions are made about you when all you’re trying to do every day is just survive. When we are unwilling to meet each other with genuine concern and care, what does that say about us? What does it say about wellness when so many women can’t be well with each other?

For years, I would hold on to the righteous anger I felt from being blamed for things inaccurately or judged without compassion. But I began to see how little we want to give others the benefit of the doubt and how hungry we are for schadenfreude—especially in relations between women—and that began to scare me into changing. I didn’t want to participate in this kind of relationship with anyone. I’ve seen this as a public person. I take note when women throw me under the bus, and I pay attention to who says what about me. I understand not everyone can like me, and not everyone wants to. I just wish it wasn’t for superficial reasons that are coded in something else. Still, these days, I know women deserve my compassion. We need it from each other. We need it for each other. “Women’s undiluted honesty is a huge threat to patriarchy,” Webster writes.^[4] There’s a revolution here, but we have to learn not to stand in each other’s way. We have to learn how to uphold the power of all women, and that upholding one’s should never come at the cost of upholding another’s.

In You Belong, Sebene Selassie explains that through the process of trying to belong, humans “tame our natural physical expression from an early age. We learn to police ourselves. Through our families, communities, and society at large, we absorb messages about what is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of our existence: how to move, how to speak, how to dress, and how to belong or not belong.”^[5] This we then use against others—we police ourselves and others against a weirdness that may or may not be present, against a beauty standard that’s fake, against a body stereotype that’s constructed. Yet all we want, all we really crave, is belonging. To ourselves and from each other. Looking to the future is understanding that the ways we’ve been programmed to be in society don’t have to be that way anymore. It’s clear to me every day the difference between committing to evolution and not is accepting that the journey is long.

We are a society that rests on the social behaviors we learned in our youth, with our families. When you decide you are not amenable, you accept your fate in a certain way. You accept your shitty, toxic behavior but refuse to accept others and theirs; you judge people for the very things you allow yourself or your friends to do; you cherry-pick alliances based on fake loyalty or camaraderie. How many times have I heard some lurid story about another woman, judged her for it, only to find out it was only partly true or the person who was telling me the story was friends with the person again? We can break from these patterns, but it takes collective awareness, accountability, and a desire to change.

We create false narratives to explain our feelings, sometimes believing them as intuition, but is treating another woman badly ever intuition? I’ve had to ask myself that question and change my own behavior, realizing how sneaky and mercurial feelings can be and how conditional behaviors and limiting beliefs not only affect us but the people in our lives as well. In moments where I’ve judged others, I was so absolutely convinced that I wasn’t being harmful, but the reality is intention has nothing to do with harm, you can still be harmful when you didn’t think you were, and I’ve had to accept that and take accountability. So, what then? Do I castigate myself for an eternity, as my mother wanted me to do? Or do I realize that all we want is care, and many of us are lacking that very thing in such crucial and foundational ways? And, if so, isn’t it our responsibility to find empathy in our hearts for each other?

I have seen so many woman exercise love and unconditionality for a man in their life, while there would be a very clear and short boundary for real compassion for other women. We have the capacity, but maybe we feel, as women, femmes, or even folks who were assigned female at birth, that we don’t deserve the compassion we crave because of the gendered construction of who is allotted that very compassion and care. Like society, we demean women every day in how we engage with each other. Our standards are low for men but high for women, and despite feminism, these are deeply embedded constructs we haven’t yet healed from.

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During an ayahuasca retreat, I learned that in many communities’ marijuana is representative of the divine feminine, and therefore her liberation is closely tied to the liberation of all women. I have also heard the analogous example of Mother Earth, of how her subjugation would only really end when we finally heal our wounds with women. Even symbolically, recreationally, we are misunderstood, misused, and misappropriated. This comes back to our interrelations as a species on this Earth. We have to see how we are communicating with her. Social and ecological accountability is what will create real shifts in the evolution of our species. Gender relationships are an important facet of understanding r(evolution). This is why turning to Indigenous organizations such as the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust^* and giving land back is an important part of our collective liberation. We must act now, holistically, on all fronts, to begin to mend the divide by choosing to change ourselves.

It’s a huge mission to challenge how we extract and limit women and how that only serves a world and ecosystem built by and large by cis men, but it’s a worthy endeavor to begin with yourself. Men have lived within a standard of boys will be boys, and we’ve accepted the pitfall of men, allowing them unconditional leeway toward sociopathy. Pretending as if power (in the traditional, masculine sense) is the only worthy and remarkable thing, when in actuality it’s the most obvious and corrupting thing. We have thousands of years of history to prove how fickle we are, that despite mythologies and civilizations built fully showcasing our downfall, we repeat the propagation of power as if we have no free will, no recourse for evaluation nor change.

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In the space of writing this book, I have been sad to see how many of my friends have been faced with darkness. To look toward the future now, as a thirty-two-year-old, is to see how easily we could have changed things if only we were willing to face ourselves. All this greed, for what? So corporations like BP can continue to spill oil in our oceans while we blame China for greenhouse gas emissions? So we can poison the rivers in Bangladesh black in order to have low-cut denim in every style? So more than one billion animals in Australia can die and forty-six million acres of land can burn just so we can live the lives we think we are owed?^[6] As the renowned primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall once wrote, “Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?”

In late 2019, “Warning of a Climate Emergency” brought 11,258 scientists from 153 countries into agreement, calling for drastic changes to the economy, including a shift away “from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being.”^[7] But this is a warning flag that scientists and environmentalists—not to mention land and water defenders—have been saying. In 2017, the Alliance of World Scientists made a similar call in a “Warning to Humanity” with 15,364 signatures calling for a complete change in how we exist. We have to change who we are and how we exist in this world, with each other and this Earth, to survive. But it takes a certain kind of cultural humility, Yunkaporta explains, which is “a useful exercise in understanding your role as an agent of sustainability in a complex system. It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realize your true status as a single node in a cooperative network. There is honor to be found in this role, and certain dignified agency.”^[8]

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Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe explains that systems are a linguistic convenience, a construction, and how humans, try as we might, “tend to repeat and inscribe these crisis events even with our best efforts to resolve them because we’re still stuck within the same epistemological space.”^[9] We’re stuck in the construction of our tiny humanist ideas of what it means to be human. But that, by very definition, is an idea contorted by the white gaze, by the dominating, occupying culture’s gaze. We are in the same loop for a bid for power, and within this state of spiritual crisis we remain until we accept our agency to release control of a system that has failed us and is still failing us. “The political spectrum itself is an illusion, suggesting that the only possible forms of social organization are liberalism, fascism, or socialism,” Yunkaporta writes. “This limiting range of governance paradigms denies the existence of a myriad of forms of human society developed over eons of existence.” Everything from manufactured adolescence (to domesticate people) to capitalism is a human construct, yet we criticize the existence of God and demonize spirit and magic because we fail to see them. We pledge allegiances to systems that are also invisible and yet prove only to divide and fail us, while adamantly convincing us otherwise. In tarot, the Tower card is one of my favorite cards. When you get it in a reading, it usually means whatever you’re asking about is in a state of collapse. The only way out is through.

We are in a state of regeneration, but things are also collapsing. That much has to be accepted. What is “sustainable” in unsustainable living conditions? Who is wellness for in a world where wellness is not for all? How can we reconcile our embarrassing excessiveness? At the beginning of the pandemic, Arundhati Roy spoke of the pandemic as a portal; in the words of Akomolafe’s babalawo, the wound is a portal. I have known this for a long time, that my wounds were my portals to a healed life—for what else is a healed life but utopia? These days I wonder more and more why we can’t work toward utopia. To me, abolition is that, it’s a belief that humans are messy, so we must create space for everyone to thrive. Enforcing barbaric systems is antithetical to a civil society, and to a just society. It’s paradoxical to have a justice system that’s lenient to some but not to others. These are all matters we should address as we move toward a collective future. “Why do we need police? Why do we need borders?” asks The Red Deal.^[10] We can create something that supports all of our needs, a society where we can collectively reimagine who we want to be. “We need to go beyond critique and maybe edge towards experimental liminal spaces of transformation,” Akomolafe tells us. We need to learn how to work together. “Every view point is useful, and it takes a wide diversity of views for any group to navigate this universe, let alone to act as custodians for it,” Yunkaporta says.

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Many things have been clarified for me during the journey of writing this book. Thinking critically about who is well and who gets access to be well unfurled a question within myself, and I was asked to examine who I am more carefully. As a survivor, and as a highly traumatized person, I’ve found that saying what I feel, what my body feels, and what I need, has radically changed my relationship to myself and thus the world. To admit I needed more, that I wanted more care—care that was consistent and unconditional—felt like an impossible demand, yet I still wanted it deep in my heart. I believe it’s possible to receive the care that I need, because it’s the care I believe I give. There is no wellness for all, but there can be a society that accepts all people deserve to feel well and have access to whatever it is that will help them to get there. But we also have to understand that people have different needs and standards of wellness, and some do need more care than others because of what has happened to them. We must make room for people who have not traditionally taken up space to do so.

Disability rights activist Mia Mingus tells us that because we are building a reality that we have never seen before, it’s imperative we flex in our vision of a truly inclusive world. But this also has to happen on many different fronts, and all of it has to be integrated for the future. Call it utopia, call it abolition, but there are futures awaiting to be made with our vision. So, what do we want? What do we want our world to become? If we could have anything, shouldn’t we want more than this? Handing land back and allowing our Indigenous elders to become the true custodians of the land again, to guide us to the future, seems like a significant step toward that future. In that scenario, we protect this Earth and we save her from complete ecological collapse. Doesn’t our species deserve a better ending than the alternative?

The Red Deal reminds us, “While making up only 5 percent of the world’s population, Indigenous peoples protect 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.”^[11] Juxtapose this against how white settlers own 96 percent of all agricultural lands and 98 percent of privately owned land in the United States. But imagine, as The Red Deal points out, if everyone’s material needs were met, and their somatic and emotional needs were met, too. Imagine the world we could have. If there was no starvation, no homelessness, no alienation, where everyone was a relative and everyone had relatives. If we had trans health, nutrition, disability and elder care, reproductive health, dental health, behavioral and mental health, abortion, addiction, and HIV/AIDS treatment. “We can address these by organizing direct health services for unsheltered and poor relatives, including providing regular, free, and nutritious community meals; distributing Narcan to prevent opioid overdoses; offering needle exchanges; handing out free condoms. We can also organize campaigns to help new mothers. Contemporary reproductive health practices completely ignore follow-up care for new mothers (especially Black, Indigenous, brown, and poor mothers) are often marginalized in ableist activist cultures.”^[12] So that means we have to completely revolutionize how we organize care and center families, children, elders, and mothers.

I’ve been thinking of Australia a lot, because I have such a deep connection to that land. My home, my island home. In 2020, right before the pandemic, bushfires ravaged through Victoria, thousands of kilometers south of where I was raised. Three billion animals were killed or displaced and millions of acres were destroyed. The grief stayed in my body for months. My entire family is still there, while I am here. The water between us connects us, as does this Earth. My mother taught me to compost, she taught me how to care for the land. These days I wonder what a miracle that is, and how complicated love can be. It’s powerful to see her clearly, still blurry from the pain, but less wounded. Forgiving her is an act of composting grief into this land, into the Earth. I was taught to do that in ceremony. When I asked how this Earth could hold more pain, I was reminded that she is our mother. And like the gracious mother that she is, she can hold immense amounts of pain. Her ferocity comes from wisdom.

These are impossible times, but that’s why they deserve impossible dreaming and visioning. In an interview, American whistleblower Edward Snowden explained: “When we think about the civil rights movement, when we think about every social progress that’s happened throughout history, going all the way back to the Renaissance, going back to people thinking about heretical ideas—‘Hey, maybe the world is not flat’—even making these arguments, challenging conventions, challenging the structures of law on any given day itself is a violation of law.”^[13] But we can and will have to change. Healing our relationship to femininity, to women, to this Earth, will shift our story as a species immensely. A few years ago, I started contemplating: Tending to ourselves, healing ourselves, has an energetic impact on the people around us. Understanding this means healing our relationships between women and femmes—through accessing and prioritizing care—as well as working through those societal standards that rely on disconnecting women from each other. The more we turn on each other, upholding men, the more they will continue to dominate. But what has all this domination led to? Why can’t we live together, in peace?

Witness how you treat other women. Do you put them on impossible pedestals? How do you react when another woman fails you? Hurts you? Is messy? Do you have to make another woman feel small in order to feel big? How do you treat a woman you don’t like? Is it the same as how you treat a man you don’t like? Be honest. I’ve had to acknowledge my own deep-seated hypocrisies, foibles, and insecurities, and how that has sometimes encouraged jealousy or resentment. I’ve had to have that honest communication with myself, so now when that happens, I let the feeling of jealousy guide me to the real heart of the matter. Every facet of being in right relationship means engaging truthfully with oneself. Restructuring how we relate to the feminine will change us, empower us. We deserve to have each other’s love and care. We deserve that kind of holistic liberation.

Footnotes

* “Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is an urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.” “Sogorea Te’ Land Trust,” accessed August 4, 2020, https://sogoreate-landtrust.org.