A Whole Lot of GRL PWR

​Hi guys!
I know that it has been a really long time since we had a chat, but please bear with me. There was a portion of time that we can honestly just refer to as “the dark days,” where I hit the lowest low my depression has been in my life. Probably even worse than while I was in Korea; my medication seemed to have stopped working, I was suffering chronic pain in my right knee, and I was gaining huge amounts of weight which didn’t help either of those things. This May, I came home for the summer from Alaska with the intention of getting myself back on track. I’m relieved to report that a switch in medications, a brace, and a verbal confirmation that I could be active again have made a world of difference.
I have an internship right now (side note: super exciting!), and as part of that I ended up going to an implicit bias/ racism/ LGBT awareness training on how to give trainings. (I know what I said, if you’re confused go back and read it again.) The training lasted all day and left me thinking a lot about sex & gender. At this point in my life, my gender is one of the few things that I’m sure about. I’m privileged that my sex and gender match up, but there’s even more than that to unpack. This is the right time to be a female. That is, a cis one. Mostly. Hear me out, please: transwomen of color make up a horribly high murder statistic. People seem comfortable with trans and nonbinary people at first glance, but aren’t so comfortable in practice. We are still being shoved into tiny checkboxes in an effort to make things comfortable for people who are stuck in the past. (I’m getting close to a rant, so Imma leave this here and save the rest for a full post later.)
All that being said, there are some pretty incredible things happening in the world. We’re fighting so that those murder stats go down, we’re working hard to give girls the same school opportunities everywhere. Full stop. This is a global issue, and one that we’re apparently mostly ready to tackle full on. This is the land of opportunity. Today’s children get to look around and seen strong female CEOs, CFOs, astronauts, teachers, leaders, and politicians. The music scene has never been a fuller display of girl power ballads. There has never been a larger collective voice reminding girls that they are strong enough, brave enough, bright enough, smart enough, or just plain enough. We’re leaving behind the stereotype of what it means to be ladylike, and erecting a statue of Beyoncé instead. 
Here are my WCWs too, since it is a Wednesday and we’re spouting mad GRL PWR today too:
Michelle Obama, RBG, HRC, Beyoncé, Ashley Graham, Leandra Medine,  Susanna Lau, Rihanna, my mom, my aunts…. (I could keep going)
Women are finally getting a seat at the table. And not just a folding chair they bring into the room with them. Women are walking into the room (where it happens) and there’s a chair waiting for them. This is a huge deal. Girl Power has been a long time coming, despite arguments to the contrary. Things have never been better for women than they are now. Let that sink in. Things have always, always been worse than this for us.
 Now is the time. Don’t wait for someone else to serve you, take the whole pie. It can be so easy to look at where we are and see how far we have left to go, but it is just as important to look at what we have done; what we are doing. There’s some bad out there right now, but there’s also a whole lot of good.