Thread by @monaeltahawy

I'm turning 55 at the end of this month.

I'll be traveling so there's no going to my colourist for a fresh yellow like I did last year. So I might just buzz it all off and have a fresh head for a fresh start.

I wrote this to mark my birthday last year feministgiant.com/p/essay-my-des…

Ever since I learned that among the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s assignments for her writing students was to begin a poem with the words “I could not say,” I've been captivated by what I could not say.

So I've been writing my way into the silences.

Each successive birthday, I take stock of what I have not been able to say.

It’s like those notches on the doorframe that mark your growing height as a child. It shows me how far I’ve come in nudging my expression free, in shaking my desire loose from the grip of taboo.

I should just title my next book Desiring Freedom.

Shaking desire free of taboos is revolutionary.

There is terror and joy in snatching desire from the jaws of shame, as we see in #GoodLucktoYouLeoGrande

feministgiant.com/p/the-fuck-it-…

I was not raised for desire. How do we learn desire?

How was I supposed to learn what I desired when desire for anyone was off limits?

feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-de…

“Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first,” Cherrie Moraga wrote in The Last Generation.

How does writing save our lives? What power lies in the act of writing that could provide such energy and solace?

“I see the same impulse in my students–the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated–turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings," Cherrie Moraga

The most subversive thing a woman can do is to talk about her life as if it matters. Because it does.

How next to avenge my silence?

feministgiant.com/p/essay-avenge…

My essays are all here.

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