life with. That feeling lasted right up until the day before I planned to propose. When we met, we were both college students, both broke, and both madly in love with each other. We spent 360 out of our first 365 days as a couple together. We made sacrifices for love almost daily. My dropping out of school to support our relationship and her being faced with the ultimatum of choosing between her mother’s rules and our love left us both giving up our pasts for our future. I wasn’t the man then that I am today. Immaturity, lack of guidance in the world of relationships, and the smothering type of love I gave ultimately put our fire out.
We loved each other enough to try and keep lighting the fire, though. The last few months of our relationship were a “Groundhog Day” set of attempts to rekindle the flame. But eventually, and unfortunately, the tears from the pain we caused each other made the wood too moist to catch fire. In a last-ditch effort to save our love for good, I took the remainder of my savings and bought a ring. It was too little, too late.
While I was trying to figure out the direction of my life, she pressed on and finished school. Her desire to practice law had been evident early on—the arguments we had as a couple were proof. Ultimately, the stress of trying to save a relationship while trying for a high GPA left her with few options for law school. To this day, I still take much of the blame. Fearful that her leaving to go to school in a remote place would prove deadly to our relationship, I planned to propose and make one last stand for our love. Unfortunately, I was a day late.
The day before I planned to propose, she took me to our favorite park, the same park where we would go for walks, have picnics, and even joke about having our wedding there. It was there that she told me it was over. That was the moment when I felt the deepest cut ever. Bigger that the absence of my father, more powerful than the blows of a mother attempting to instill discipline; in my ears, it was even louder than the helicopters and machine-gun fire of the military. Unrequited love was almost the death of me.
That night, I went to a gas station near my home and purchased thirty tablets of Tylenol. The thought of living without love was worse than living at all in my eyes. I took them. But before lying down for what I thought was going to be my last sleep, I called my mother, who had already lost her brother to suicide earlier that year. I told her what I had done, and my hysteria was matched by her thirty-plus years as a nurse. She told me to stick my finger down my throat and meet her at the hospital. I did not make it to heaven that night, but I did meet an angel.
I arrived at my neighborhood’s psychiatric ward a while later, filled with hopelessness and despair. How could I go on with life? I thought. It was then that a nurse with a ward full of people with illnesses far more emergent than mine gave me a tour of what her facility looked like, sharing stories of the patients she had under supervision that night. “You don’t belong here,” she said, in a voice that was both soothing and stern. She ended up giving me a journal, with the instruction to trade my pills for a pen. With that pen, I released my most prized possession—my heart. Three years and three books later, that heart wrote out what has been my most beautiful masterpiece to date: Dear Woman, a letter to women all over the world who also know pain, and hurt, and despair. May these words lead you when you feel you can no longer lead yourself.
“From the moment she was born, the one title that could never be taken away from her was ‘Woman.’ It would be her first gift from the world and also her largest cross to bear.”
Every time a child is born, it is a gift. It is a sign that God has not given up on the world, a sign that life must and most certainly will continue. When God decides to make that child a woman, the gift becomes even more special—special because women at their core are the guardians of our existence, the facilitators of life, and the rawest example of pure, unmanufactured, unadulterated beauty that we have the pleasure of encountering in the entire universe. As deep as that may sound, it is most certainly a true statement.
This beauty is displayed in many different ways. From a woman’s shape, to the way she feels, her physical features, her mental capacity, and most certainly her emotional superiority. A woman is the world’s most prized possession and must be treated as such. While this is a job that can only be achieved by women accepting and perpetuating the challenge—and men acknowledging it, the foundation must be laid from within.
“It is imperative that all women understand that no one, man or woman, can accurately love you until you love yourself first, and more importantly, love yourself most.”
Being a woman is an opportunity to be fearless and feminine, brave and beautiful, strong and sensitive. All at once. As a woman, you have the power to be both the target and the missile in almost any situation or environment.
We live in a world that puts women first and last. Historically, men have always treated women as their subordinates. The irony here is that the lion’s share of decisions men make, both long range and day-to-day, are in some way, shape, or form, whether subconsciously or knowingly, for women. The million-dollar question is, why? I’ll get to that. For now, understand this:
Whether it be for their mother, the woman they desire, the woman who is their partner, or the woman they bring into the world themselves—the cars men drive, the clothes men wear, a man’s physical appearance, desire for social status, and just about anything else a man does are almost all done to impress some woman. That’s not up for debate. This gives a woman the opportunity to achieve the upper hand in almost any situation where her femininity is matched by a male presence.
But women, please note: with great power comes great responsibility; responsibility to yourself, responsibility to the world, responsibility to your world—and everything you let in it. This includes a responsibility for you to protect yourself from anything that threatens your happiness, challenges your womanhood, or attempts to make you feel like you have to be someone different than who you are. Period.
Dear Woman,
Before you were anything,
you were a woman.
Before friend…
Before lover…
Before girlfriend, partner, wife, or other…
You were woman.
Let no title,
whether it be manufactured by society
to define your existence in the world,
allow you to change whom you permit in your world.
The title of “woman” came before,
will never change during,
and most certainly will remain after.
You must never lose that title while in search for
or trying to maintain any other.
“Woman” is the crown.
The titles are merely jewels.
“In
