How Do You Call Your Power Back To You?

On alchemizing collective grief and refilling our cup

Dear Reader,

Cut straight across from my underarm line I said as I passed my husband the scissors. I sat straight and still, seated backwards on a dining chair in the middle of the lawn. He’d done this for me before and I trusted him now to get it even. I felt a gnawing necessity to shed some weight, unable to carry it all — the grief of reckoning with what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal world, and the extra inches of hair. Done. I reached back to touch my ends and looked to the wet, intact curls on the grass, drying in the afternoon sun. My eyes grew wide,