All the Women in My Life

I am a distinct combination of all the women in my life. A get-together with my girlfriends will remind me of that.

It’s an intimate container to be in and to witness – the gathering of women to talk, eat, laugh, cry, witness, and hold each other. It’s less about the setting and the set-up; it’s about the people there. Gathering with women is healing, and in a lot of ways it feels like being closer to God.

It feels ancient, no, ancestral, when I get together with my girlfriends. It feels ceremonial and eternal to be with other women and spill our hearts to each other. We are not burdened by any kind of duality – when women are together we are everything, especially one another. In no other situation can I access such sweet liberation, access the world and the universe.

I am grateful for everything in my life, and above all, I am so grateful to be a woman. So many parts of my personality, my habits, my vernacular, my self are inherited from women in my life. Their influence is spectacular and divine – I am just like every other woman in my life.

The way I embrace the messiness of my spirituality can be attributed to Lyric. Maggie showed me that I can be beautiful and sharp, borderline weaponized. The girls I work with remind me that I don’t have to be so old. Their freshness and playfulness the antidote to taking everything so seriously. Alana is a constant reminder to take life slower, as slow as you want to. Nothing has to be done right now. Nothing has to be done tomorrow, either. Kyla shows me to be observant and thoughtful about those around me. Ali is proof that women should be louder.

I drive with a lead foot thanks to my mother and grandmother. My twin sister, Cait, is a reminder to work harder. Not because she’s my competition, but because I have someone who’s always pushing me to level up. My piano teacher gave me the gift of reading sheet music and keeping a rhythm, so even when I mess around on a drum set I can keep up. Kathryn is always with me because she always said we are of the earth.

There’s a tremendous sense of power and closeness I feel when I can gather with my friends, whether it’s just meeting someone for dinner or catching up with the girls over drinks. It’s an art form, a form of self expression, to show up and talk. Talk about ourselves, our love lives, what we’re eating, who we’re fucking, what we want to do with our lives, who pissed us off, people we don’t talk to anymore, our relationship with our families.

To be around women is to be in a permanent revelation. I go deeper into my external and internal world of experience. I am closer with myself. I am closer with every woman, not just those that surround me in that moment. I am every woman in my life and every woman I’ve passed on the sidewalk or admired from afar.

It’s philosophy and friendship, it’s power and strength. It’s a lingering lightness, long after the buzz of red wine has faded, long after my friends and I have parted ways for the evening. It’s simultaneously the feeling of knowing that my friends and I would have been burned at the stake just a few centuries ago, and it’s knowing that I plan on being the same loud and difficult, yet tender and understanding woman again tomorrow. To be everything I want to be, delivered with a smile and a wink.