day FIVE HUNDRED and FIFTY SEVEN

There is Nothing Stronger Than a Broken Woman Who Has Rebuilt Herself

How do you learn to be worthy?

This should be a textbook given out in class

to every girl

to every queer

It will be thick and the font will be too tiny to read.

How do you learn to be worthy?

When your stories don’t matter

when you’re told to stand on the sidelines

when you have sat at the table

of self-hate

and eaten everything you can

get your hands on.

How do you learn to be worthy?

How do you undo what has been done to you?

How do you manage the trauma?

This book would be a journal

a confessional

a series of tweets

from women about how they breathe

stretch and

wake up every day into a world that hates them.

It would be a book about how they stay alive.

It would be about survival

not happiness

not success

not mastery.

It would talk about being the only woman in the room.

It would talk about shame.

It would talk about laughing at yourself

in order to stay safe.

It would talk about being invisible

and living in that invisibility as if that were okay.

It would talk about power

and how power is not something you are allowed to touch.

This book would not talk about men.

There are already enough books written about men.

There are tomes and they are studied in schools

with accolades and tall wide halls.

Plus this book about learning to be worthy is not for them

because the binding is not big enough

for that conversation too.

How do you learn to be worthy

in a world that tells you

you are not.

How do you carry blood

in your veins,

thoughts in your mind,

beats

in your heart.

How do you stand up every day and

decide that you count

when everyone around you

tells you do not.

How do you learn to be worthy?

This book has two words

and they are not

me too

they are

what

else?

--Ally Malinenko