a welcome
hello lovelies!
i finally have a breather to say hi to all the new subscribers that have started reading i was cooking this past month. i’m gobsmacked and so damn thankful you’re here, and truly so honoured you’re reading my work :) the newsletter grew by about 50% this month alone, which is enormous for me.
in march, i hit and quickly surpassed 100 subscribers, which i’ve been striving towards for so long. i know that there’s no value in chasing numbers, which is easier said than done, but i only internalised that concept once i had my first 100 readers. there is some power to that number, 100, that gives me validation. i’m no longer “trying” to write. i’m here, i’m doing the writing thing, i’m writing, i’m a writer. that’s a difficult admission to make! but the fact that you’re reading makes it true.
this week is special because it marks a full year since the day i entered a new chapter of my life. a year ago today, i quit my dead-end sales job that paid decently but sucked the marrow straight out of my bones. i packed too many bags and set out on a two month solo trip across japan, thailand, cambodia, indonesia, and australia. once i made it back to boston, i decided i would become a writer and embark on a long-term career change to become a user designer.
i hate the cliche of “finding yourself” through travel, but that time away truly gave me so much clarity about my life. while i was gone, i realised i wanted my life to undergo a full gut renovation. the bones were solid — the bones being my friends, partner, family — but the inside was rotting. i felt directionless, unambitious, in a creative rut, had no physical energy or emotional energy or time to give to anyone, including myself. i was doomscrolling and shopping constantly to numb my mind after a day of work and dreading the start of each week, praying for the end of the month to bring a close to the impossible sales goals we had to hit. if how we spend our days is truly how we spend our lives, as annie dillard wrote, then i was adamant on sleepwalking through mine, finding that it was the only way to cope.
today, a full year later, my life is profoundly different. i’ve taken on a couple of one-off freelance writing assignments, i’m writing here consistently, i’m working part-time at a spot i adore, and i’m taking a user design bootcamp that may or may not lead to a job but i love the daily act of learning nonetheless. i’ve taken a big “step back” from any semblance of a career yet i’ve never felt so centered.
in the last almost nine months of writing, i’ve given myself the freedom to explore what it is that i like to write about and what i’m good at writing. you may have figured that out from the disparate topics i’ve covered and how they (don’t always) relate to the title of the publication. i hope that, since this is a smaller audience, you’ll be ok to witness this period of continued experimentation. thank you so much for being here :)
links for the girlies
with 2023 being dubbed “the year of the girl” and the proliferation of critiques and essays about girlhood and womanhood that have abounded since then, i’ve noticed myself questioning my own relationship to feminism and whether the movement still holds any space in my life.
i likely didn’t learn about Feminism as an organized movement until my early teens. but feminism as a personal belief in equality — brought on by an early reckoning with how girls and women are expected to follow a different set of rules in life — made up the whole of my being probably since i was four years old and first told to cross my legs and stop running around shirtless.
with all the reading i’ve been doing, i realised that i haven’t identified myself as a feminist in years. if i had to point to a moment, i would say i stopped identifying with the movement sometime between learning about hillary’s loss in the election on the morning of november 9, 2016, and seeing thousands of women wearing bright pink pussy hats during the women’s march on january 21, 2017.
i didn’t understand my revulsion with the hats then, but i do now: the hats planted the seed for me to start questioning why i was so hell bent on propping up a woman who voted in favor of the iraq war, who cost so many thousands of women and girls like me their lives all over the middle east. i no longer saw myself in solidarity with the women in the pink hats, who seemed to embody a feminism that began and ended at demanding comfort and rights for the white american woman.
this month, i’ve been thinking a lot about revisiting feminism’s role in my life and specifically learning about the more radical components of it that might better align with the person i’ve grown into. erin texted me after the last newsletter about how “girlboss feminism” is entirely antithetical to feminism as a whole because it “requires viewing other women as the enemy, especially those who are content to just work to live instead of making the grind our whole personality.” she’s right, and that text sent me into a tailspin about how the mainstream feminism we live with now (“lean in” feminism, choice feminism, liberal feminism) is a feminism so watered down, and one that had to become so irradical, in order to be accepted by the public and touted as a core value by the very corporations that dictate our existence. it’s an inoffensive, palatable, non-transformative feminism that seeks to find space within the patriarchy, not outside of it. it’s not really feminism at all.
i have a lot of learning and reading ahead of me (and btw, please send your suggestions for books/multimedia on the topic of feminism), but to wrap up the month, i wanted to let you in on the thought provoking essays that threw me on this path. the four i highlight below are ones that are (in order) in conversation with one another, framing girlhood as an opting out of the grim reality of womanhood (isabel cristo), interjecting that most “girls” are never insulated from sexism (
and ), and the failure of modern feminism and whether there even is any value left in the movement (). finally, tess from pinpoints the pandemic as a precise period when momentum for feminism fractured, and posits a hope that we may be nearing a tipping point that will lead us towards a more radical feminism.Woman in Retrograde by Isabel Cristo for The Cut:
Instead of politics, can I interest you in some blissful, childlike ignorance? In Vanity Fair, the writer Delia Cai asks, “Is it reactionary or radical … to don the pink dress and beribbon ourselves in spite of what we know?” The answer is: Neither, and that’s exactly the point. Finding an answer to that question is the purview of womanhood. Girlhood, instead, is an opting out of the whole calculation, a low-risk way to participate in mass cultural femininity.
While in theory girlhood precedes the adult concerns of feminism, in reality, these concerns often intrude into the lives of girls, many of whom must negotiate sex and sexual identity, enter and navigate the workforce, access abortion care, and deal with misogyny that limits their lives from the moment of their birth. Many of us began to work out our own feminist politics as children, and associate the aesthetics of girlhood strongly with our first forays into questioning the patriarchal structures around us. Girlhood offers certain comfortable, universal markers, but not all girls are the same, even if they’re wearing the same color and going to the same concert. One girl may live in near-total political ignorance; another may develop a sharp socialist feminist critique of the world she is growing up in; yet another may go down a reactionary path.
How do we grapple with cultural forces that may encourage problematic consumption habits while also acknowledging that fashion, music, movies, and other products we engage for pleasure don’t necessarily imply that we are dupes of patriarchy and capitalism?
While pandemic era femininity – and feminism – have been so marked by consumption, and dissatisfaction grasping desperately at empowerment, I think the beginnings of serious push back are emerging in this gray winter we’ve been in, and I think we need to grab onto these impulses and push them forward as much as we can. In my online world in particular, I’m seeing more and more women and queer people critiquing systems instead of each other, and asking one another to think critically about how we engage in those systems without blaming and shaming the individual.
if you enjoyed reading this, click the ❤️ button below to help more people discover this on substack! i’m curious to hear from you in the comments: what’s your relationship with feminism? is there something else you’re grappling with or coming back to this season? what are your thoughts on the girlies and when do you think we stop being “girls” and become “women”?
Loved this. And it’s interesting; I also wrote thinking about feminism recently, but from a different prism. All the prisms are necessary and valid and needed.
https://open.substack.com/pub/piecesofstring/p/amelia?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Oh I loved reading this and getting to hear how you've been thinking of your relationship to feminism in your life! Thanks so much for bringing me into the reflection. <3