How many pity parties have you had in the last week? the last month? By my count I’m up to about two full on “poor me” moments and about a half-dozen or so micro-moments. Because it is hard! No matter how funny and rewarding trying to raise a family and a maintain a career can be (yes, snot and dirty child sized hand prints on your new Anne Taylor suit are HILARIOUS) we still struggle. We get down in the dumps. We think to ourselves sometimes (gasp) “what is the point?”
I was reading CNN online yesterday and saw a piece on the young Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai, who had been shot in the head by the Taliban. From now on I shall always and forever call her just “Malala” because quite frankly if Rhianna and Madonna are cool enough to earn single moniker status this girl deserves it a thousand times over. Not only did Malala not die from her horrific injuries but it’s almost as if that bullet transformed her. She addressed – mind you she is sixteen and has suffered a traumatic brain injury – the delegates of the United Nation. And let me tell you, she crushed it! Of course I wept silently while reading the article but once I watched the video I became a big weepy mess http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SClmL43dTo . Her strength, bravery, and conviction of the essential goodness of humanity was overwhelming. I can’t quite bring myself to forgive the guy who cut me off on the 101 last week (yes you, Mr. Twenty-Something-Driving-Too Fast-In Your-Dad’s-BMW) and yet this sixteen year old has forgiven the men who brutally put a bullet in her brain.
In case any of you have been living in a bubble the last few years and missed it, the reason this amazing young woman ended up with a bullet in her brain is that she was an outspoken advocate of girls having the same educational opportunities in Pakistan as boys. Kinda make you rethink skipping class sophomore year to smoke cigarettes behind the bleachers with your girlfriends, right?
And as if the simple fact that this young girl, who had suffered the worst kind of violence, for what we think of as the most basic of human rights wasn’t emotional enough she actually wore a pink (loving her even more) shawl that once belonged to Benazir Bhutto, the two-time (female) prime minister of Pakistan who was murdered in 2007 in a suicide attack.
Badass. Totally and completely badass.
So the next time we want to throw ourselves a pity-party we need to stop and remember that by simply being who we are and doing what we do we are a beacon of hope for millions of women around the world. It’s like our secret super-power. We walk around in office attire by day and soccer mom attire on the weekends but underneath we have this big giant “E” emblazoned on the hot pink skin-tight super hero cat suit we are rocking underneath our clever disguises. “E” for equality, equanimity, evolved, empowered, endowed with these truths that we hold self-evident. We are a walking example of how to be brave and free and equal in every way.
Hold your head up high, my friends! The women of the world are counting on us.
The next time your son vomits all over you before the most important meeting of your life remember, the words of the Malala, “The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.” So just mop it up and get on with conquering the world.
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