Strong Women

The last week has been rough and weird and confusing in big messy handfuls of ways, one of which I wrote about last week, but others that I’m not ready to write about. Plus that, I’ve been thinking about and suffering from the weird distance and solitary life that the internet can lend itself to. Though I’ve always appreciated my solitude and do very much like working on my own, in a quiet little bubble of my clutter and my laptop, since leaving $pread back in January (wow, I can’t believe its been almost nine months), I’ve begun to realize how much I miss collaborative work. Though I trust myself and my judgment on various issues (like I think I did a good job dealing with what was thrown at me during Spitzergate back in March) all by my lonesome, I need to reach out more too. And I need to leave my house and/or pick up the phone, both of which are sometimes harder than they should be.

This week I feel like I’ve been veering into the realm of questionable sanity, so I’ve been trying to remedy this with the whole socializing thing. And tonight as I rode the subway home, I was thinking about the many amazing women I have in my life, and how radically different that is now than my social circle when I was younger. As a teenager, I disliked women in general. Though I had a few tight relationships with women, they were tinged with sex and violence - weirdly competitive eating disorders, self injury, drugs, being slutty in the bad way, and being romantically and savagely cruel to one another. My first real female friend of my adult life, who was a roommate of mine when I first moved to NYC, now refers to me as her arch nemesis. So me and the ladies - not so good.

But today, virtually all the people I feel intense kinship with are women. And hopefully I’m not now and won’t become arch nemeses with any of them. I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that the majority of them are also women who’ve spent a good amount of time in and around the sex industry. There are a few exceptions, but not a lot.

This week I feel like its important to me to pay homage to the ladies I’m hanging out with, eating with, talking with and gathering strength from. They’re a pretty amazing bunch, and I’m glad I’ve pushed myself to reach out, get social and get talkative.

Over the weekend, I spent a solid few hours on the phone with the very lovely and sadly geographically distant Madeline, after having gotten a sweet voicemail from Jamye Waxman, who is out in the desert at Burning Man. Libby has frequently been sending ass-kicking, helpful and encouraging emails. I’ve been getting to know and appreciate Catalina over the past few weeks. Today I spent a helpful and awesome hour on the phone with Lia and then went out for the evening with Eliyanna, my once co-executive editor at $pread and now superb friend and travel buddy. Tomorrow I’ll get to spend a few hours getting tattooed by the amazing Joy, and then catch up with a bunch of ladies who used to work at AbbyWinters.com. Thursday evening I’m planning to go drinking with ex-pat tattoo nerd Marisa and I might just get to top the week off with a dinner with Tess. And I desperately need to catch up with Ms. Bella Vendetta, who I described in the acknowledgments to my book as “the toughest, hardest-working, and biggest-hearted woman I know.”

I am lucky - and these women are incredible.