There is a woman I know who became a mother last year. She is exhausted and radiant and figuring it out in real time, and she has never looked more herself. There is another woman I know who lost someone she loved deeply, and the way she has moved through that grief, with such elegance, has taken my breath away. There is a woman who left a stable job to build something of her own, and is doing it, slowly and surely, from her kitchen table. And then there is my mother, who has done all of this, in one form or another, across a lifetime. These are the women I want to celebrate this International Women's Day. Not just because they are exceptional, but because they are. Full stop. They simply are.
The pressure to be something more.
As women, we are remarkably good at making ourselves feel like whatever season we're in is somehow the wrong one. Career women feel the pull of motherhood. Mothers feel like they should be doing something else. Women who are resting feel guilty for slowing down. We measure ourselves against a version of womanhood that doesn't actually exist. a composite of every expectation ever placed on us. This International Women's Day, I want to push back on that.
Women in every season.
What strikes me about the women I love is that the season itself is never the point; it's the way they inhabit it. Friends who became mothers, figuring out their new shape with so much love and so little sleep. Friends who faced loss and carried it with such elegance, not letting it harden them, but deepening them. Friends who took an idea and started building, without a safety net, with just enough conviction to take the next step. And my mother, who has moved through every season with a steadiness I have spent my whole life quietly learning from. She never called it strength. She just called it getting on with it. But I know what it is.
You are exactly where you need to be.
Whether you are building or resting, thriving loudly or surviving quietly, deep in motherhood or deep in your own reinvention, you are not behind. You are a woman, in a season, doing what that season requires. Women are the most extraordinary creatures on this planet. Not despite the complexity of their lives, but because of it.
Writing this one felt personal, because it is. I have been incredibly lucky to be surrounded by women who inspire me, not from a distance, but up close, in the ordinary moments that make up a life. My mother. My friends who are new mothers. My friends who are grieving. My friends who are building. My friends who are, right now, in the quiet middle of figuring out what comes next. My sister, my cousins. What all of them have in common is not that they have it figured out. It's that they keep going anyway. That they are honest about the hard parts. That they show up for themselves and for each other. That they resist, even imperfectly, the pressure to be something other than what they are right now.
I don't think there's a more important message this International Women's Day than this: the season you are in is valid. All of them are. The loud seasons and the quiet ones. The ones where you are flourishing and the ones where you are simply holding on. You don't need to be in a different season to be enough.
xx,
Diana