09/03/2026
Years ago, when I was in the middle of being brutally, publicly trashed by people I thought were my people, I wrote to Gloria Steinem.
If anyone knew how to survive a “feminist” trashing, she would. She’d endured a lot of slings and arrows, and she was still standing. Shining.
She didn’t know me but she wrote back.
She told me that an individual can never stop a trashing. Only a community can.
From that, I realized I had to stop trying to get through it alone. I had to stop explaining myself better and stop seeking the one perfectly worded sentence that would make it stop, because there wasn’t one. There was only each other. The pain was collective in origin – my sisters! – but so was the medicine.
Also: Ms Magazine saved my life.
One afternoon, as an abused, shame-soaked teenager spending my summer at the library, I picked up a Ms Magazine and read it cover to cover. I learned that the thing my Opa was doing to me was a thing that happened to millions of girls and children around the world. It had a name. It had numbers. It had a source, and the source wasn’t me.
Which meant the shame was not mine to carry.
Being able to zoom out and see that bigger picture dissolved my shame, instantly. That allowed me to push back, to refuse, and eventually, a few years later, to have him arrested.
It’s a lesson I’ve carried every day since: the thing we think is our fault, the thing we hold as proof of our wrongness, almost never is. It is almost always an unjust social condition being downloaded onto our individual shoulders.
That lesson, and how to turn pain into power, formed me. It saved me. I still teach it every day of my life.
When luminaries like Ms Gloria Steinem leave us, and the generation ahead of us — our elders, our matriarchs — start departing one by one, please remember that their light isn’t gone. The torch is being passed. It’s ours now. We’re becoming the elders and the matriarchs. We’re going to be the ones the kid at the library finds, and we had better be worth finding.
Let’s do our teachers and lighthouses and beacons, the ones that saved us and formed us, proud.
Rest in pleasure Ms Gloria Steinem. You were medicine.
