1.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. –Maya Angelou

I am stitched of my favorite images of female

strength and courage,

portraits painted by the words of Angelou.

She painstakingly bore her story, breaking

out of her cage and soaring into my soul.

 

Her love rendered in my veins, pulsing

as though I witnessed her pain.

Angelou unleashed the story that often goes untold,

inspiring others to become the phenomenal women

they always had the power to be.

 

2.

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful. –Elizabeth Wurtzel

As I read Prozac Nation for the first time,

my friends worried that the book would trigger

me, they worried that I was torturing myself by

reading the story of another woman's depression.

 

What they couldn't understand, was that I found

solace and solidarity amongst those words.

Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote in a hope to set herself free,

while doing so, she did the same for me.

 

My heart ached for her as she spiraled into abusive

depressive episodes, which very much resembled my own.

Her stream of consciousness mirrored my internal monologue.

My pain was validated in writing. In a neuro-typical male

dominated world, she spoke for the screwed up women

who were so tired of explaining themselves over and over again to speak up.

 

Wurtzel's writing gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning,

one day I hope to do the same for someone else.

 

3.

It has been said that women have evolved into the men

we wanted to marry, it seems that we have also

turned into the men whose work we willed to read. My thoughts have spun

into Sylvia Plath quotations and Audre Lorde regurgitations.

I used to fear that my work was turning into reiterations

of the women who inspire me, but then I recall

that we each have unique navigations

in a world that wasn't built for us.

Since then I have never run out of things to say.