#36 Bracing for Impact
What Do You See?
When I look at this image, I see utter destruction. I see a young father, full of adoration for his daughter, being swindled by a greedy salesman. I see little girls, lined up and shuffled forward into the arms of someone disguised in pure white, ready to be initiated into the shepherd’s fold. I see patriarchy, misogyny, and devastation. Only one person recognizes the pain, and she is utterly petrified.
To the Little Girls
You, full of wonder and beauty, pure and precious—you need no baptism to wash away sin or to prove your faithful heart. You are already whole. You are already clean, filled with rushing waters that cleanse and sustain you daily. The lies try their hardest to convince you otherwise, to keep you in service to a system that is—and always has been—wrong.
You are not subservient to men. You give birth to men. You provide life to men. You are a Goddess. The masculine fears your supernatural powers: to conceive, to gestate, to birth, to nourish. You do all this naturally and abundantly. Take a deep breath, my girls, and rise up. Stand solidly in who you are. It is time.
A Small List of How Males Have Controlled Females
1973: Women were first allowed to serve on juries.
1974: Women were allowed to have their own credit cards.
1975: Women could finally open their own bank accounts.
1978: It became illegal to fire an employee for becoming pregnant.
1979: Women gained the legal right to say no to sex with their husbands.
1981: The Supreme Court overturned laws declaring men the “head and master” of property jointly owned with their wives.
1981: Sandra Day O’Conner is the first woman judge on the Supreme Court.
1993: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the second woman judge on the Supreme Court.
Education, medicine, finances, and religion—all have been used as tools of control. Even now, medical anatomy books fail to fully include the clitoris. Helen O’Connell’s Anatomy of the Clitoris was published in 2005, but her research began decades earlier.
For centuries, the diagnosis of “hysteria” was used to medicate, institutionalize, and control women. Later, it became words like bipolar or borderline. Forced sterilizations of disabled and imprisoned women still happen today in the United States.
Here is the truth I emphatically declare:
Any teaching that claims man above woman—or man above anyone—is wrong. False. It is a rotting garbage pile, poisoning everything built upon it.
To the Boys
You, witnessing the mistreatment of anyone who does not rise to become the “all-powerful male,” hear this: This is not your purpose.
You are wholly connected to the earth and to the feminine. But as you grow, this connection is pounded, squeezed, and stroked out of you. You are taught to embody masculinity as control, authority, toughness, and emotional rigidity. These lies strip you of your humanity.
Manhood does not mean muscles, gruffness, or stoic leadership. It does not mean domination, aggression, or repression.
Manhood means glowing with your unique spirit, shining your light, and embracing the wholeness of who you are.
Inside every man stomping his boot and intimidating others is a little boy, terrified of not being enough. Most of those little boys are trapped—buried under years of suppression, locked in closets, or lost in woods of their own making.
But manhood, masculinity, and boyhood are not prisons. They are freedom. They mean bravery and softness, charm and mess, logic and emotion. Just like girls, just like the genderqueer and nonconforming, boys are unique expressions of earth animated by spirit.
To the Men
Not all men, no. Many have stood against toxic norms. Many have persevered through discrimination and threats to embody integrity and authenticity. Many shine as examples of steadfast, wise, and generous individuals.
But to the young father in the cowboy hat, whose blonde-haired daughter looks to him with innocent trust… To the men who dedicate years to theology, believing they are serving God… To those who have hoarded power and stepped on others to get it…
What have you been taught? You were instructed that honorable living means providing for and protecting your family. That you must be the hero: brave, adventurous, and irresistibly charming. You have absorbed ideas that weakness is sharing emotions and caring for others, that this was women’s work. You witnessed generations of men governing in prideful and stubborn ways.
What was the cost for such power? How were systems built, countries established on these distorted ideals?
Gluttony. Lust. Pride. Greed. Wrath. Sloth. Envy. These “seven deadly sins” aren’t arbitrary—they are the roots of abuse. They are the fuel for systems built on manipulation, shame, gaslighting, and force. They may bring success and power, but they shrivel the spirit and desecrate the soul.
This is how I define hell: living in a way so incongruent with your soul that you must repress everything good in your heart. Many of you are in hell.
To Us All
I have lived the devastation of patriarchy, incest, addiction, and denial. I have felt the fire of this world eating away at the innocent and the holy.
We all suffer the effects—on our bodies, on our earth. I want to see these legacies fall. I want false histories and pseudo-science burned. I want systems built on segregation, dehumanization, and hate to crumble.
New systems must be built on cooperation, wisdom, and the innate value of all life.
If you knew—truly knew—that your value was and always has been as an irreplaceable, indestructible spark of life, how would it change the way you see yourself? How would it change the way you see the world?