Tear-jerking ambition. Agonizing, pulverizing doubt. Unwavering effort. Cavernous labyrinths of insecurity. Glimmering clifftops of inspiration. Boggy sinkholes of confusion and paranoia. Abject terror at thought of exposing deepest truths. Wildly inflated self-image. Unabatable joy over one flawlessly chosen word. Divine contentment knowing one perfectly constructed sentence is somehow going to save the world. Even if only my own. Lurking suspicion that I’m a hopeless impostor. Inexplicable rising confidence. Doubt again. Paralyzing fear of eternal rejection. Continued effort amidst creeping progress. White-knuckling any escaping belief and willing it to remain in my clutches. Preparedness. Overpreparedness. More work. More doubt. More fear. More hope. More joy. More criticism. More words on the page. The courage to submit. The desperation. The hope. The rejection. More work. Hope. Hope. More work. And hope. And clutching. Clutching. Believing.

Look, people are nice enough. They’re not trying to ostracize.

But it’s what happens to a woman when she steps outside of the culture of expectation and into the wild of her own making. She becomes a lightning rod for judgment, hostility, and suspicion.

Luckily, some women are obsessed with lightning. I love everything about it. A bright, coursing light from some celestial place above chooses to make contact with us and then a near instantaneous passage of energy from one atmosphere to another produces an electromagnetic pulse of unearthly power and force. It’s the very same phenomenon in the medical field that’s used to restore a normal heartbeat and wake people out of their cardiac unconsciousness.

The science of lightning is the science of the human soul in my opinion and I think of it like a high-voltage surge of life for what’s dead.

I don’t just want to see it, I want to be it.

We’re not the shooting star, we’re the sky.

We’re not the avalanche, we’re the mountain.

We’re not the wave, but the inclement sea. 

We’re bulk, not fragment.

Unquantifiable. Uncontainable. 

Our vastness cannot be fathomed.