Women’s History Month: 31 Days of Women

I started a #my500words challenge & I was doing alright (I was writing on my journal mostly…hand-written word counts are gross), but I wanted to use this challenge & celebrate women in my life at the same time. So I scrapped everything that I was doing (yes, I even burned some paper — RIP piece of trees), and I started over and got this project started. It’s still a work in progress, and I’m definitely getting into the details of this as I go, but I think that I’m on to something pretty great. I don’t expect any of this to be viral, but I know that this might be the biggest and most ambitious project I have to date.

This endeavor is going to be…a lot. And I’m going to need some serious accountability the next 31 days (no really, please pester me if I forget please), but I think that if there’s one thing that I love about blogging and the digital hyper-documentation age is that I have the privilege of documenting this and having this archived for the rest of my Internet life. With very shaky confidence, I think that if I pull this off, I am creating something that would be so empowering and amazing not just for me, but for folks that read this little writing space of mine.

Choosing to do this is something that came while I was (well, in all honesty, I still am) in this weird personal rut that I have been battling with for more than a year now. The typical creative, I have projects that I started & left unfinished, my creative outlets started to become bleak & uninspiring. I needed to really find a way to thrive and be happier, and I know I wasn’t going to get that in my autopilot state. So instead of waiting for some divine intervention, I wanted to do my part & put in the work.

This idea really came to fruition because I wanted to be represented in a way. As a young, female creative person of color, the representation of my kind is a very broad spectrum. In my opinion, our work is constantly seen & image-saturated, but our stories and journeys are rarely heard. Everyone has a backstory; everyone has a struggle. I think that we all have that right to have our stories heard, and while our work may speak for itself, I think that sharing our journey to where we are at is important as well. Also, it’s women’s history month, and I wanted to celebrate it by getting to know the life & woes of people that I look up to. The women that I want to show are not Nobel Peace Prize recipients (yet), nor are they world famous in their respective fields (again, yet). But they do deserve to have their stories heard, their faces seen and their lives recorded because everyone deserves a place in history, big or small.

These stories will hopefully inspire you to look at the creative women in your life, and what they can offer you in your own journey.