For my Girls

“I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship…I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimately—without context, without boxes—and I yearn for them to know me that way, too.”

“I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of my mom, so I stayed silent. Cooperative.”

“I'm becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I'm aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It's armor. It's easier to be angry than to feel to pain underneath it.”

“I'm trying every day to face myself. The results vary, but the attempts are consistent.”

“Writing feels inherently real.”

― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“The indifferent orange rays of the year

dipping into the horizon,

slowly then all at once,

then the relentless beginning

of the new one always leaves me melancholy.

Maybe it’s because each new day begins in the dark.

I’m dreaming of all that’s left to do.

And mourning what’s been done.

Is it sad that this feeling is the most familiar one I have? My most consistent companion. I always cycle back to this. It lives in my bones like a ghost with unfinished business. I am a walking haunted house.

Womanhood is merciless in the sense that we can never walk away from consequence. Our bodies carry our unborn children in the form of eggcells since before our births. We bleed them out every month. And if one sticks, we pass on our experiences to our children in altered genomes. Even before we’ve had the opportunity to actively fuck them up.

The horror of genocide and abandoning a homeland aside, the plight of the Indian woman immigrant of my mother’s generation was a desperate one. A lonely one. I feel this desperation woven into every stitch of myself.

I’ve been thinking about motherhood a lot.

For a few years now. I think women have to actively decide pretty early on whether they’re going to, as Mike Birbiglia’s dad would say, “Zig or Zag”.

It’s not until you are standing face to face with this decision that you can fully appreciate it’s magnitude.

Either way, you’re going to have to grieve a part of yourself.

The choice you don’t make.

The life you won’t lead.

The future you have to bury.

I decided a few years ago that I would not be having children. There are too many horrors in me that I can’t inflict on an innocent. There are too many un-lived dreams in me for me to sacrifice. I spent my whole life taking care of my parents and their emotional needs. I want for my adulthood to be about nurturing the broken part of me that wants so very much to heal.

I unfortunately was never good at multi-tasking. I applaud those who can.

Nature parcels a profound sense of meaning and motivation in the form of a child. Those of us who refrain must search even more purposefully for a sense of meaning strong enough to sustain us. For me, my healing is that purpose. If I heal and can be strong and do what is in my true nature well, then I will have made a difference.

Jeanette McCurdy’s book, I’m Glad My Mom Died, helped me explore my relationship with motherhood in an interesting way.

Jeanette’s mom was way more troubled than my own mom. But abuse and neglect have some parallels that are easily translatable. I felt like I could really understand where Jeanette was coming from. Children are so in tune to their parents and will often times become the caregiver for an infantile or depressive parent.

I know from experience that children will learn that they have to do life alone and that their needs won’t be met pretty early on in neglectful households. By doing this they suppress a huge part of themselves and sacrifice their childhoods. It follows them like a shadow into their adult relationships filling them with undue anxiety and unhealthy attachments.

In Jeanette’s case, she continually molded herself to her mom’s whims and manic requests and lived like a stranger in her own body. She suppressed her fear, her anger. Her joy.

She just wanted to make her mom happy. She wanted to be a good girl. Her body couldn’t hide her loss of control and inauthentic lifestyle for long and she became anorexic and later bulemic due to her mother’s obsession with keeping her small and childlike and thus marketable to Nikelodeon as a child star.

Women and girls’ bodies are so commercial. They are sold to us. They stop belonging to themselves to sit upon these shelves of capitalism.

Dr. Gabor Mate, renowned addiction and disease expert, often talks about how suppressed emotions become diseases later. The body always keeps the score. People who are caregivers or abused as children always have a price to pay for it in terms of strange bodily maladies and auto immune diseases when the body turns on itself.

Our society manufactures diseased humans and animals en masse and we are moving too fast to truly change.

Women account for almost 80% of autoimmune diseases reported.

We are not allowed to express our emotions or humanity without cost.

That’s why I love Jeanette for channeling her emotions so powerfully and openly and not shying away from some hard truths.

Jeanette tells her story with a sense of humor and strong voice she had to actively earn after her mother died. She had to save her self from the trap she had been born into.

She also made me realize just how complex our relationships with our mothers are. You can love someone, understand their shortcomings, appreciate their struggles, but still hate what they did to you.

And that you can very much make different choices than they did.

It made me realize that being a good and kind person who is authentic to themselves, is in fact, the hardest thing to keep doing consistently. Especially in this frantic society that takes so much and gives so little.

Dr. Mindy Pelz blew my mind. I know the countless benefits to fasting from weightloss to rebalancing your immune system and dopamine system. But I didn’t know that women should fast according to our menstrual/hormone cycles.

I think we tend to associate a lot of negative things like moodiness and rage with estrogen. Or we tend to see it as very delicate and sensitive.

The funny thing is, it is the lack of estrogen that causes moodiness and physical alterations.

Estrogen helps bones be strong, helps the brain stay clear, it helps us be emotionally resilient, and helps boost Growth Hormone so we can have more energy and heal quickly.

This is why post menopausal women lose bone density and hair and face other bizzarre and traumatic changes.

This hormone keeps us alive and thriving.

I learned that certain times of the month we can fast longer and eat high fat and high protein diets that keep insulin low to help our bodies produce optimal levels of estrogen. And then there’s a peak time of month when we have estrogen, testosterone and progesterone and are gifted with extreme mental clarity and energy. (This is something no man will ever experience. Imagine society collectively embracing this energy. It is a resource.) This is a good time for tackling tough or highly creative challenges. And to increase your workout routine.

There are times of the month when we need a high carb diet to help us produce progesterone to help shed our uterine lining and to ease discomfort. This is the time of the month when you should rest and nurture yourself so you can replenish. (Something that our society discourages. Resist that. Rest is rebellion as much as it is restoration.)

I learned how cortisol is detrimental to hormone production and how oxytocin can counteract cortisol.

Oxytocin is the cuddle hormone. Or the bonding hormone. You get it when you laugh at a joke, hug someone, have sex, masturbate, or have a stimulating conversation where you feel connected to someone.

So make that phone call to your friend. Go for a walk with your sister. Play with the dog. Light some candles and have a snugglefest with your partner. You could be saving your life.

It can reverse the effects of stress and encourage your body to run at its peak.

Half the book is science and strategy. The other half is recipes.

Why didn’t someone tell me about this earlier? A gentle step by step how to on how to approach your best life as a woman. Even if your pre or post menopausal.

If you’re a woman - read this.

If you’re a man - do yourself a favor and read this too. It will help you so much in your relationships with women to understand our biology a bit more.

I know this might have been a bit of a downer, but I’m actually quite motivated this year. I have many projects brewing. I’m excited to share them with you in the coming months.

I’m going to leave you with a poem from LeAnn Rimes:

Woman, there is great power in your cyclical nature, for we are nature itself. We, like nature, create life and live by nature’s rhythms.The soft animal that is your truest nature knows this at the deepest level.

Our job is to remember, to strip away the layers of societal conditioning and interference, the image of the “good girl,” and come home to our most natural textures and rhythms. Every orgasmic joy, every primal scream, every gut instinct, every deep sorrow and wail of grief, every moment of surrender to rest, the shedding of the old, every ounce of our creative power is to be allowed, honored, and again made sacred.

You are sacred. Not only in your brightest light, but also in your darkening. Your greatest power lies in the flowing with your rhythm and surrendering the fight against nature, your nature. Because in the end, Mother Nature alwasy wins. Our choice lies in whether or not we choose to assist in her unfolding.

Remember to rest. And remember, to do life on your terms.