Thread by @monaeltahawy

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

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.

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