Women’s eNews is thrilled to welcome Amy Ferris, a highly accomplished author, screenwriter, television writer and editor as our new weekly columnist. Every Friday, you will be invited into her world, where she will champion, encourage and inspire women to awaken to their greatness, as only she can, through passion, truth, hope, and humor — along with a heaping side of activism:
Welcome to my column.
She is not flawed – she is courageous.
She is not broken – she is a mosaic.
She is not overweight – she is more, much more than enough.
She is not too much – she is bold and audacious; fierce and mighty.
She is not fragile and weak – she is strength personified.
She is not broken – she is a mosaic.
She is not overweight – she is more, much more than enough.
She is not too much – she is bold and audacious; fierce and mighty.
She is not fragile and weak – she is strength personified.
She is not your competition – she is your greatest self.
This is where I will call home for the next few months, or year or two. This is where I get to share – write about, spew about, shout about – my deepest hopes and my deepest fears and my deepest desires for women, all women. This is where I will encourage all women to vote their life: their future, their kid’s future – not the life of their partner or their husbands or their abusers or the guy sitting in the oval office.
This is where I will tell you that when we go into that booth in November, the 2018 midterms – it is just us in there, alone in that booth – with all our dreams and hopes – and that we deserve the very best life has to offer. No more crumbs for us. I will remind you of that. This is where I will share stories about love and loss and grief and pure unadulterated joy and yes, sex. I will share stories about sex. This is where I will stomp my feet and say we must stop attacking each other, we must stop tearing each other down, we must stop ripping each other to shreds – it’s unattractive and unnecessary…and it only causes pain. There is more than enough pain in the world; let’s not inflict it on each other. This is where I will raise the bar and raise the stakes and raise holy hell for women to stand taller; to stand up, to stand side by side, and to stand with. This is where I will tell you loud and clear to make sure – to be mindful and yes, thoughtful – that any and all women who are standing under the awning at a bus stop should never be thrown under a bus. This is where I will be relentless when I talk about championing each other, supporting each other, and lifting each other because what I have learned, witnessed, and observed is that we have a far way to go. This is the very place I will remind you that we women do not stab the very backs we should be standing up on. Jealousy and pettiness and envy are no longer in fashion, and I will keep reminding you of that. That, I can promise.
This is where I will encourage you to stop keeping other women at arm’s length, to take off the armor that has weighed you down, to remove the scaffolding that has been up for years – no doubt, out of self-protection – – so you can show off and flaunt your beauty and magnificence. This is the place where I will inspire you to awaken to your greatness, to stop caring what others think, to wear kindness because Goddess knows kindness goes with everything. This is the place where I will remind you – relentlessly, I might add – that all of our imperfections and all of our foibles are indeed our beauty marks; that our mistakes can be transformed into our mission, that dreams don’t need to die or are packed away or tucked into the back of a drawer with old love letters and yellowed first chapters – – that dreams can be rekindled and re-ignited and all it sometimes takes is a spark, and that spark can come in the form of one human saying: ‘Go ahead do it…do it.’
And this is the place that I will stand up on a soapbox and remind you that we have unlimited power, untapped power, and that anger is not power.
This is the place where I will remind you, as I constantly remind myself, that we have become the women our mother’s longed to be, always wanted to be.
This is the place where I will demand that we all – each of us – take down the walls that we have built around ourselves, the walls that keep us from being intimate, keep us from sharing our down and dirty, keep us from sharing our truth, keep us from exposing the very stories that move and rattle and shake and, yes, understand another human heart.
I will be right here…every week.
Please, join me.
