There is not a single human being on this planet who has not benefited from a woman's pain 🩸

Hello beautiful soul

I was on the subway last week, and as much as I love NYC, I could feel my rage rising. 

Looking around the carriage at women of all ages standing. And a world of men sitting, lost in their phones, staring at nothing, heading somewhere. And a thought landed in me so clearly that I had to sit with it for a few days before I knew I was ready to say it out loud.

I am going to say it here first. To you. Because I trust you sis. 

THE THOUGHT: There is not a single human being on this planet who has not benefited from a woman's pain.

Let me say that again. There is not a single human being on this planet who has not benefited from a woman's pain.

Not one. We all came from a woman's body. ALL of us. 

The invisible pain women carry every single month is what ultimately keeps the species ALIVE. Regardless of whether we ever become mothers in this life, we still carry that load. 

Then if we do become a mother, the pain is more visceral, the service is even more real. 

This is pain we weather so quietly that there is barely even a cultural language for it. The cycle that — if it stopped — would end humanity as we know it. The blood and the ache and the hormonal upheaval that we manage in silence, month after month, season after season, while someone asks us why we are being so emotional.

Without that pain. Without that magic. Without that monthly miracle our bodies perform whether we asked them to or not. Our species would cease to exist.

And yet, here we are, standing on the subway, like nothing is happening, whilst men comfortably go about their business. 

And we wonder if it even is fair in today's world that men should even give up a seat to a woman? We are all equal now... right!?

Well, this might make me a controversial kinda womanist, but I think we should get offered a seat, or at least there should be concern enough to see if we might need one. 

Why? Because offering implies reverence for the invisible load that we carry. 

The main people I see doing this today are other women. I do it all the time. And the reason is obvious. Because the load isn't invisible to us. We viscerally feel it and witness it in our sisters. 

But honestly? The seat thing I can just about handle. If that's the worst thing that happens to us, I'll be okay. 

What I can't handle, is that we are still having to make the case for our own safety.

I want to share some numbers with you. Not to frighten you. But because I think we owe it to ourselves to stop absorbing this as background noise and actually feel the weight of what they say.

Every ten minutes, somewhere in the world, a woman or girl is killed by her partner or a member of her own family.

Every. Ten. Minutes.

Globally, 840 million women — nearly one in three of us — have experienced physical or sexual violence in our lifetime. During the World Cup alone, domestic abuse reports in the UK hit a record high. 384 incidents. The majority after England lost to Argentina. Because a match did not go the way someone wanted.

And that is just what gets reported.

But here is what I really want you to understand. Because this is where it gets personal.

Our bodies know this. Not as statistics. As lived experience. As something encoded in our nervous systems long before we had language for it.

We are the prey. Men are, statistically, our apex predator. Not all men. But enough men. Enough that our bodies stay ready. Enough that we calculate the route home before we leave. Enough that we hold our keys a certain way in the dark. Enough that we walk into a meeting already braced.

That is not anxiety. That is accurate threat assessment.

And it does not switch off when we walk through the office door.

The way we shrink before we speak. The way we edit the comment before it leaves our mouth. The way our nervous systems are permanently calibrated for threat even in rooms where the only danger is being underestimated.

When I wrote about this link — between what women experience in the world and how we show up at work — a man told me I was wrong to call men our apex predator. He wanted me to know he has been scared of women too.

I am sorry but nope. 

This is allowed to be only about us. Just this once. Just in this conversation. 

But let me now tell you what is possible my darling... 

I came back last weekend from a retreat in the mountains in Georgia. Nine women. A house in nature. No agenda except to see what we could co-create together. I taught yoga. Someone led breathwork. Someone brought a gong bath. We talked. We held each other.

And something happened in that space that I have noticed every single time I am in a room that is only women.

We expand.

Not because men are bad. But because we have spent so long managing the energy of mixed spaces — code switching, self editing, performing a more palatable version of ourselves — that we have forgotten what it feels like to just be. Fully. Without calculating the impact.

(To my sisters of the global majority, I see you on this so hard.)

In that house in the mountains I watched women access parts of themselves they had clearly not visited in a long time. A softness. A wildness. A depth of connection that does not require explanation or justification. Gifts that we suppress every single day in order to fit into a world we did not design and were never fully consulted on.

The nature we suppress. The knowing we silence. The power we shrink because the room is not safe enough to hold it.

I am not trying to build a world without men. I LOVE men. But I am trying to build a world where the feminine is revered again. Where what women carry — in our bodies, in our communities, in our leadership — is finally treated as the sacred and essential thing that it always was.

And in the meantime, I want to be clear that life in NYC is a WHOLE MOOD for an array of reasons. 

One of the things I love most about living here is that across this whole city women speak life into and over each other every single day.

Darling you look amazing.
Honey you are rocking that outfit.
Wow you smell incredible.
Girl your whole energy is everything.

That is medicine. Real medicine. For women who have spent their whole lives being measured and managed and politely corrected by people who were never qualified to assess them.

I only get to experience real freedom when I am in a room full of women. And that is both incredibly sad and incredibly special. 

Sad because it should not be this rare. Special because when it happens something extraordinary becomes possible.

Build the rooms. Find your women. Hold each other.

And if you want to be in a room like that — not just for a weekend but for six months — Women Who Lead is that room. Seven women. Sisterhood, somatics and strategy. The September cohort is forming now.

Hit reply. Let's talk.

You were never the problem. You, my darling, are the whole damn solar system. 

Rooting for you always
Ruth x