All We Have is Our Hunger

I wanted to write something today about word making. I wanted to come here, to this space, and share with you tried and true methods that have helped me put pen to page over and over and over again.

Instead, I am showing up with a bottomless rage.

//

A few years ago, I had a dream. In this dream I was in a mall with some friends, and I set my bag down in an area we recognized as safe.

But it wasn’t safe. My bag was stolen.

Devastated, I went to the shop owner to see if it was possible to look at security footage so we would know who took the bag. She didn’t hesitate, and led me to her office where we were easily able to determine who did it. It was a group of grown men. And even though what they were doing in the video was simply stealing something, the actions were violent. I remember their laughter. I remember them intentionally taking this bag because they knew it would hurt me.

I felt violated.

It felt as if I’d woken up from being drugged, sore from the attack.

I began weeping uncontrollably.

“Will we be able to find these men with just their faces?” I asked in between tears.

The woman smiled.

“Oh yeah. We got ‘em. Don’t worry.”

I did get my bag back, and immediately looked through to see what they took. I was mostly concerned about cash I had, but they took nothing material, only my wallet that had my driver’s license. I got worried.

Looking at the security officer near me who’d join the search in helping me find my things, I asked her if I was going to have issues getting to where I needed to go.

She told me no.

“How, though?” I asked, confused. “I don’t have my license — and I need to go somewhere tomorrow.”

She looked at me.

“Word of mouth.”

I woke up then, and as I lay in bed processing the dream, a few things came to mind:

• I was moving deeper into healing. Deeper into my calling. Deeper into my Naming.

• The first thing I heard when I asked why this dream, why now, was this: it is always the woman who save each other. I realized then I was at the mall with my girlfriends, and they were the ones who held me as I waited. They were the ones who comforted me as I grieved. It was the shop owner who helped me find the perpetrators who stole from me. And it was the security officer who protected me and told me she would look out for me, telling her sisters to look out for me too.

• Even more, we save each other through story. In her book When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams says: “My body is my compass, and it does not lie. As women, we are quiet about our personal lives, especially when it comes to sex. We are quiet because there is a history of abuse and hard committed toward those who tell the truth. Marriages are shattered. Families are broken. Judgments are rendered. The woman stands alone. Our stories live underground….Muriel Rukeyser asked the question, ‘what would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’ The world is splitting open.”
  The security officer told me I would be able to get where I need to go because of word of mouth, meaning the telling of my story.

• In my dream, I found that I had nothing material stolen from me. The only thing taken was my wallet with my driver’s license. When I thought about this fact after I woke up, I realized something else: they stole my identity and they did so with violence. The only way I could get this back was through the telling of my story.

//

I wanted to write about words today. Instead, I am writing about hunger. I am writing about rage.

I am still convinced that these two things are interlinked.

//

A few weeks ago, I saw that Meggan Watterson, a woman who is absolutely part of my lineage of thought, had an interview on We Can Do Hard Things podcast with Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach. I started listening to the first few minutes, and immediately tears started falling from my eyes. They were gathering together to go feral — how they need women around them, individuals who understand what is happening and are feeling a growing rage within them. They were talking about the Epstein files. And they were mentioning Deepak Chopra, who in an email to Epstein said, “God is a construct. Little girls are real.”

I got two minutes in before my heart felt too big for my chest, I heaved a sob, and turned off the interview. I finished the dishes in silence, the tears running down my cheeks.

//

My husband and I were returning home from dinner one night, and I was talking to him about this author I’d heard about from another podcast I listened to at the time. The author was Florence Scovel Shinn, and I’d just spent the last week binging some of her books. This was before the pandemic, before I fully deconstructed from evangelicalism. Listening to these books, talking about these books, still felt risky. But, something had happened in the process. As I was listening to these books, a thought kept surfacing. These books very much center on the power of your words—Shinn says your word is your wand and for years, this was a sticker on my phone, reminding me of the thoughts manifesting into my conversation and life. She also uses Scripture in her work, and this is where the thought kept peeking around darkened corners. This is where I was circling with my husband on our way home from dinner.

“I keep wondering, as she is using these verses that I grew up with and know like the back of my hand, the impact of men standing behind a podium and telling me how to interpret these words.”

“I don’t understand.” He said.

“I mean that I keep wondering what would have happened if I had the chance to read these verses through a different context instead of a man controlling the narrative? How would I have interpreted them? How would I have lived? If someone wasn’t in front of me telling me how to do so, what would I have done differently?”

“Ah.” He replied.

“And if I go even further,” I continued, “how have these interpretations of scripture been used to control us rather than free us?”

We were quiet for the rest of the drive home, but I couldn’t stop thinking about men, placing themselves as the gatekeepers to the divine, telling us what to do and how to feel and what was good and holy and what was decidedly not.

Within a few months of that moment, I would read Mary Magdalene Revealed and the trajectory of my life would irrevocably change.

//

This past week, I sat down at my computer to write. Threads was open on my screen, and a post caught my eye. It was a woman requesting other women who were fed up with men to respond. The comments were filled with memes of women smoking Molotov cocktails, dystopian Barbies lighting shit on fire, and one that stole every ounce of breath from my body.

“Let me guess,” the post read. It included a link. The link was for a CNN article that released in March.

“Rape Academy,” I whispered to myself as I clicked on the link.

And then my world disappeared.

I didn’t write that day.
I haven’t written since.
Instead, there has been a growing rage, a vortex of hunger, opening up within me.

It only grew more ravenous last night when an alert dropped on my phone: teenage boys, taking pictures of their peers who are girls, and using AI to remove their clothes.

The warmth of Eve beckoned me, and I dropped into her fire.

//

Here is where I am at now—where these two disparate things keep circling around each other: if it is the women who will save us, if it is the stories of our sisters that will open our eyes and loosen our chains—then what is THE story I keep pushing away for fear of judgment? What is the thing behind the thing, the truer root that speaks to every story poking its head above ground? Where are the storied grottos waiting for me to baptize myself, like Thecla? And where are the satchels of cardamon and cinnamon so I can throw them on my sisters who are doing the same?

Because I think it might be this rage.
I think it might go deeper and spread wider than I ever thought possible.
I think it might, like mycelium networks, brush up against the stories of my sisters, whispering truths and direction, carving pathways underground for the stories that have yet to see the light of day.
I think it’s time for these stories to stretch into new roots, the rage at our back, with fingers that feel like Eve.
Because we are not the first who have known the silencing power and violence of men.

But there’s another question forming right beneath that one—the one where I hold my rage close and listen for signs of life.

If new maplines are drawn when we speak our truth, then what is this terraform we are creating and who are we bringing along with us? Because if we don’t include everyone, if our love is limited, then we haven’t hit bedrock yet. We have yet to grapple with what is root bound within us—the ways in which this system continues to rip out our tongues and keep us silent so we swallow our words until we become bloated and malnourished.

We cannot transmute this sacred rage within us, pointing us toward what we have always known, if we still listen for the gatekeepers and believe in their version of reality. And perhaps you’re like, well it isn’t that big of a deal. It’s just an ounce. But giving them an ounce of power is still an ounce. It is a seed that is not planted where it belongs—within you.

So what is that ounce?
What is that seed?
And how might that seed grow, if given the proper attention and care?

//

They have taken away our power.
They have taken away our magic.
They have taken away our tongues.

All we have is our hunger.
All we have is this seed.

What is your hunger shouting into the void?
What is this seed you’ve let them steal from you?
I’m holding my hand out, a single root reaching for your soil, and listening to the whispers waiting to be released.

Here is the secret they don’t want you to know: we can take everything back.
Our power.
Our magic.
Our words.
Our hunger.

It is all there, waiting for us to return. Waiting for our sacred rage to burn a path deeper within us. That clearing—that ash—is fertile ground.

Use it.

Drop the seed and feed yourself.
And then write the words you’ve swallowed.
We’ll be waiting with the satchels of spices, throwing them your way, pounding our feet and yelling at the top of our lungs—millions of women reclaiming their power and magic and hunger and lighting the world on fire with their Truth that is filled with sacred rage.