Happy International Women’s Day! I was honored this year when @ethnikos_kirikas asked me to write about my experiences as a woman in the creative arena, in order to be profiled alongside some truly incredible Greek-American women.
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I’m also aware the majority of you probably can’t read it. So I will say a couple of things here.
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I could talk about how growing up, I was told by society to distrust other women, to view female friendships as frivolous, and instead came to find that in my moments of crisis or weakness, I had powerful, caring women next to me who believed in me more than I did in myself at times, and gave me strength I could not find in myself in those moments.
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I could talk about how I’ve been so amazed and impressed time after time, to see women around me with such unfair expectations and burdens placed on them by our world, still somehow manage to pull through and do it all.
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Instead, I will focus on this: I am acutely aware, every time I get to live life on my own terms, how many women before me fought and suffered and toiled and stood strong against overwhelming odds to give me that freedom, that gift. And every time I find it hard to stand up for my ideals, to cling to my standards for how I and other women should be treated, to forge a path that doesn’t always align with the “feminine ideal”…I gain strength from the knowledge that we are all fighting for our daughters. So they can feel even less of the burden that society has made of their gender, so they can be free and thrive in ways we can’t even fully comprehend.
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May every generation of women fight for the next, may we honor the sacrifices, both daily and grand, of those who came before us, and may we look around our world and remember to fight for women everywhere.
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