The path forward and why you must write right now.
I’m particularly talking to you, women of a certain age.
At dinner on New Year’s Eve, December 31st, 2024, also my birthday, I announced with a fair amount of manufactured confidence that I was going to make 2025 the Year of Me. At the table with me were my elderly father, dealing with age-related health issues, my husband, at the height of his hugely demanding career, and my 14-year-old son, heading off to high school next year. Above them all, I was going to put myself: not only my well-being, but also my writing and my work as a writing instructor, coach, and editor. I assured father, husband, and son that I would continue to fulfill my duties as a daughter, wife, and mother, but that I had to come first in my own life. A week later, Congress certified Trump’s win. The following day, the neighborhood next to mine, where we had built our community during the seven years my son attended school there, burned down. Beyond my familial duties, my responsibilities as a community member grew exponentially, as did my need to re-engage politically. The Year of Me was off to a rocky start.
At this same time the world combusted around me, a gift. A golden, glimmering, shimmery light that illuminated the path forward: Demi Moore’s Golden Globes acceptance speech for Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture. (Here I must admit that, yes, I love/hate watch awards shows.) In her speech, Moore recounted that about 15 years into her career, a producer categorized her as a “popcorn actress.” For three decades, Moore operated within the constraints of that label, silencing her belief that she was capable of more and wanting more. At 62, she finally accepted the opportunity to demonstrate she could tackle dramatic roles. It paid off. She proved the producer wrong. She took the label that had been holding her back and flung it down.
She ended her speech with this anecdote:
“In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough, or skinny enough or successful enough, or basically just not enough, I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough. But you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’ And so today I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me and for the gift of doing something I love ...”
So, okay, not the most groundbreaking message. You’ve heard something like this repeated before, especially if you came of age during Third Wave Feminism when we were told women can have it all. But for me, in the particular moment I heard these words, slouched into my couch, drowning in powerlessness, feeling the Year of Me dissolving before even forming, reeling from this country, once again, failing to elect a female president and from the imminent onslaught of the broligarchy, forced to imagine a future in which everything I believe has been obliterated, I hung on Moore’s speech like a lifeline.
It struck me—in just the way I needed it to, willed it to—that we women must identify what we each do best and then do it, loudly and ferociously. Do not wait for permission, seek validation, or apologize. To do what we do best, whatever that is, with conviction, is today an act of resistance. It is our power. It is how we become inevitable. For me, what I do best is teach writing and work with women writers to help them honor their voices and put their writing into the world.
What do you do best? What is your power? If it is your voice, your writing, your story, the time to put it down on paper and share it with the world is now. If you’d like support on that journey, I’m here for you. Let’s go. The Year of You lies ahead.