I have to remind myself that softness drives the revolution as much as rage. A pandemic, like revolution, does not happen overnight. 

We will emerge, our hearts unhealed and scarred but awesome. feministgiant.com/p/essay-fallin…
How do I want to stand in this in-between, this forever now, in such a way that honours how scared I am but also how alive I am to the potential that is born from emerging?
How do I best feel this time, fear it, and accept my fear so that I can expend my energy not in denying I’m scared - it’s fucking exhausting denying your’re scared - but instead use it to emerge, wiser, into my new reality?

Transformation is hard.
Learning to sit in the fear and chaos and learning to be friends, or at least to make eye contact, with that fear and chaos is terrifying and awesome; awesome as in:
adjective Text: adjective 1	extremely impressive or daunting; inspirin
Except instead of “the awesome power of the atomic bomb,” it is instead the awesome power of the changing body, evolving from what was into what will become.
I wasn’t paying attention at first, to be honest: to either my perimenopause or the pandemic. Once they both started, there was no going back and it was unclear what lay ahead. You’re in an in-between that can take years so you’d better learn to acclimate.
Perimenopause? Or Pandemic? It’s like a fucking TV quiz show. Jeopardy but for hormones. 

And even now, I’ll be so fucking bone-tired-exhausted that I’m in bed all day: periemnopause or pandemic?

As I move through both pandemic and perimenopause: how do I want to emerge?
Understanding the macrocosm of the pandemic through the microcosm of perimenopause: not as a way to demonize the natural process of change that is perimenopause, but to honour the lessons it is teaching me.
I’m learning to sit with the fear and chaos, submit to the change from which there is no going back, prepare to emerge, and applying them to a global upheaval that I have very little control over but after which there will be “no going back to normal.”
There is no going back. We must emerge, not regress. We cannot reverse. We will emerge, our hearts unhealed and scarred but awesome.

feministgiant.com/p/essay-fallin…
All my essays go here.

feministgiant.com

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More from @monaeltahawy

17 Jan
As more women are arrested for involvement in Jan 6 insurrection, support of QAnon comes up again & again. It is a "movement" driven largely by white women that FBI labelled terrorist threat in 2019.

I wrote this about them: White Women Storm the Capitol feministgiant.com/p/white-women-…
And this about the first QAnon supporters to be elected to the US Congress feministgiant.com/p/a-white-supr…
Marjorie Taylor Greene - one of the most dangerous people to ever be elected to the US Congress (and that's saying something) is a QAnon supporter, a white supremacist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic. Look how Elle article described her to see the fuckery white women get away with Elle magazine headline: The...Text: Marjorie Taylor Green...Text: A common thread among...
Read 11 tweets
16 Jan
If they were not white, from any other country, or certainly if they were Muslim, these women would be called fanatics, thus is the privilege of whiteness - the audacious innocence afforded to white womanhood. So I am calling them fanatics.
White womanhood is privilege sweetened with an innocence and fragility that white women--liberal or conservative, Trump-voting or not--are adept at weaponizing. 

So I am calling them fanatics. feministgiant.com/p/a-white-supr…
These too are fanatics: the white women who stormed the Capitol.
Read 8 tweets
16 Jan
"There's the overall sense that maybe if some of them have guns — and likely the ones who are more into conspiracy theories & QAnon w/pedophilic satanic rings — are we safe from them?" Some Democrats in Congress are worried their colleagues might kill them google.com/amp/s/www.nbcn…
Marjorie Taylor Greene once described Trump's presidency as a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out." Text: Greene, who has clash...
“Some lawmakers have suggested that Boebert, a Second Amendment advocate and past QAnon sympathizer, may have deliberately revealed Pelosi's location during the attack on Twitter. Boebert also tweeted "Today is 1776" the morning of the rally..”
Read 10 tweets
15 Jan
I’ve been calling them the Christian Brotherhood, since I moved to the US. The Muslim Brotherhood in my country of birth Egypt never dreamed of ever having this much power.
“If more white women - liberal and conservative - had fought white supremacist patriarchy as zealously as they fight Brown Muslim patriarchy, if they had obsessed less over Muslim women and more with their own oppression, we would not have had Trump...” feministgiant.com/p/if-amy-coney…
So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing white women that they’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia or Iran, that so many white women did not pay enough attention to the theocracy that white supremacy was building right here at home.
Read 11 tweets
15 Jan
First-time GOP Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert might not have been among the fanatics who stormed the Capitol on January 6, but their views very much make them fanatics within that same building.
feministgiant.com/p/a-white-supr…
They are the first QANon supporters elected to Congress and both have said January 6 was Republicans’ “1776 moment,” in a reference to the American revolution. But the insurrectionists were not revolutionaries. They were not fighting a tyrannical state.
They were fighting to extend the tyranny of white supremacy, which has seen its fruition in Donald J. Trump. 

If Trump could give birth, it would have been to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, both of whom are clearly created in his image.
Read 13 tweets

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