The last time this happened, I was 26. We’d just experienced yet another contentious election cycle and there was a somberness in the air, similar to the gray clouds that have been hanging in the Georgia sky for the last three days. I remember having this impulse to build community, because that’s what women do. We gather.

I happened to be watching an episode of Chelsea Handler’s Netflix series Chelsea called Dinner Party: These Strong Women. I highly recommend watching it if you never have. She gathered Connie Britton, Deshauna Barber, Hilary Swank, and Ava DuVernay for dinner to discuss various aspects of girlhood and womanhood. I loved the questions she asked and I decided to host a dinner part of my own. I called it Womanhood Dinner.

I invited eight friends for a spaghetti dinner and conversation. The wild card I threw in was for each woman to bring a question she had always wanted to ask other women, but was afraid to ask. It would be a judgement free zone. Five friends showed up to that dinner; they didn’t necessarily know each other well, but they all knew me.

Something shifted that night. Trust was built. Hope was restored. We all agreed to do it again, and we did. We had dinner and sometimes brunch with that same prompt: What’s a question you’ve always wanted to ask other women, but were afraid to ask?

We started out meeting twice a year for the first two years. Then, in 2019, we started meeting monthly, challenging each other to do things outside of our comfort zones. We went hiking, ax throwing, thrifting, high tea-ing, pizza making– every month we encouraged each other to do something out of the ordinary. Universal law says that the way you do one thing is the way you’ll do anything, so it’s no marvel that courage and boldness in our social circle translated to courage in other parts of our lives.

Some of us started businesses. Some started going to therapy. Some got married. Some ended relationships. Some healed relationships. Some moved to other states. We encouraged each other to, in the words of Ntozake Shange, “find God in [ourselves] and love her fiercely. ”

During the pandemic lockdown period in 2020, we met on Zoom every week on Thursdays for Womanhood Happy Hour. Over cocktails and conversation, we strategized about everything from salary negotiations to home-buying to having courageous conversations with our moms. We exchanged recipes, prayers, and affirmations. We nurtured our dreams and each others so that we could live the lives we wanted, and not the ones prescribed to us by parents, societal expectations, or limiting beliefs.

Today, of the starting five, only two of us still live in the same city, but our sisterhood is beyond state lines and national borders. We know we are not alone and that makes all the difference. Love makes us bolder. In the words of Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

I share all of this to emphasize that no politician, vote, or singular act has the power to determine how we live our lives. Will we have to march? Yes. Will we have to get into the state houses? Double yes. And most of all, we’ll need to double down on kindness and compassion.

So it’s time for the women to gather. We set the rhythm and the tone for this world. When women move, the world moves. So let’s gather, support each other, and lift each other up. Start your own Womanhood group and get to living your dreams. A life well lived is the best way to assert your personhood, so keep on living.