The audacity of a woman who wants.
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The audacity of a woman who wants to be loved, wants to be angry, wants attention, wants to be left alone, wants space, wants a voice, wants support, wants freedom, wants help, wants autonomy, wants a community, wants to grieve, wants to be joyful, wants to please you, wants to please herself, wants a room of her own, wants a full table, wants to be understood, wants to be known, wants more. To be a someone who wants what she doesn’t have or wants more of what she does have is to be bold, brave, courageous and risky and if those are adjectives that have ever been used to describe you, Congratulations, you are a woman.
Sinead died. I wrote the above list. I saw the Barbie movie and America Ferrera’s speech made me cry. (If you’ve seen it, you know the scene.)
I’ve been relistening to the Sinead discography all weekend, I bet I’m not alone. It’s been years since I’ve listened to Lion and the Cobra all the way through. I was 18 when that album came out. I was graduating from high school and moving away to college. I was so full of passion and rage and fear and certainty and once I popped that cassette into the tape deck of my 280 ZX, it didn’t leave. I was so ready to escape my small town and that was the first of many future moments I’d have where I was so fearful of what could be but I knew I couldn’t do what I was doing anymore. It’s not like I left a conservative small Texas town for a liberal mecca, no. It was the same game, different rules and no matter where I went, there I was.
Up until that point, not a single adult in my life had ever asked me a pretty straitforward and essential question: Sondra, what do you want? In fact, no one asked me for a long, long time. But I eventually did start asking myself, in my journals and when I did, I had no practice. It’s taken a long time to answer that question with truth and clarity.
If you are a woman over 45, I would gesture to say that you haven’t been asked that question often either, so allow me to ask…What do you want? Do you want to be sad? Do you want to rage? Do you want to be rich? Do you want to be generous? Do you want to be quiet? Do you want to not have it all figured out? Do you want your creative work to matter?
Tell me, what do you want?
