This is what a feminist looks like.

This past week, I got to see one of my best oldest friends Rochelle who was visiting NYC with 2 of her high school friends. Rochelle and I have known each other since kindergarten - almost 18 years!! We were part of our best friend crew "Cheristarenia" - roCHElle, kRIStina, TAmra, LAra, kathleEN, cynthIA. We were so cool. We were so cool we had to have two names for ourselves; we also sometimes went by "TaCynCheLaNaLee." After hanging out with Rochelle this week, I was just filled with joy and gratitude that our friendship is still solid after all these years. We didn't go to high school or college together and haven't been everyday fixtures in each other's lives, but when we do come together again, it's easy and real and life-giving. She is part of my foundation and always will be. Those roots go deep.

So, I started thinking about how blessed I am to have such amazing girlfriends in my life. My grade school best friends really are special! Yes, our friendships flourished in middle school and consisted largely of passing notes and talking about boys, but as we have grown our friendships have grown. I know I can count on them for support and love. We can no longer call ourselves a crew (it has been many years since some of them have spoken to each other and many more years since we have all been in the same room), but individually my friendship with each girlfriend is real and present. There have been challenges, but I have never experienced the pettiness or backstabbing that can be the downfall of friendships.

Thinking about this foundation of girl power coincides perfectly with my other floating thoughts concerning feminism. I recently finished two books - Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan and Bossypants by Tina Fey. (I should say here that the books belong to two of my current amazing feminist roommates, about whom I shall have to blog later). I absolutely love both books. Click is an anthology of essays by diverse women about their feminist aha moments and beginnings. Bossypants is Tina Fey in a book. What more could I want?

For one of the essayists in Click, her feminist awakening involved becoming friends with another feminist. She writes, "It's a relationship with an ally that enables you to inhabit your feminism." Several other essayists write about how having feminist mentors to guide them was powerfully formative. So even though Cheristarenia/TaCynCheLaNaLee never had group circles about feminism, I realize now how much they have influenced me. My most powerful friendships are with women and I realize that my grade school girlfriends are the foundation of why I believe so strongly in sisterhood. Sisterhood gives inspirational power to my all-women's service org Marians at LMU. Sisterhood gives physical power to groups like the Pink Sari Gang. Sisterhood gives comedic power to the cast of Bridesmaids and the dynamic duo Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.


Which brings me to Bossypants. One thing I wanted to mention in this entry about that book was Tina Fey's anecdote about going to a conference where women were asked to think about the time they first knew that they were becoming a woman: "Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them."

This got me thinking about when I first knew I was becoming a woman, on top of thinking about my own feminist click moment. I can't think of one illuminated point in time when I knew I was a feminist - I sort of fell into knowing I am a feminist because of many experiences throughout my young life. As one essayist in Click so elegantly wrote: "This piece is disjointed and fragmentary and piecemeal...because that is how I came to feminism."

I find it interesting that as I thought about Cheristarenia/TaCynCheLaNaLee, I realized for the first time that a couple interactions with grade school male classmates definitely foreshadowed my future feminist self. The first interaction involved me academically competing with my classmates Raul and Stephen. I remember wanting to answer more questions correctly in class than them. I remember wanting to "beat" them in quizzes and tests. Yes, I was a geek. The second interaction involved myself and Tamra playing basketball at recess with KC and Stephen. I remember the satisfaction we received from being able to play with them and "beat" them there too!

Obviously, my feminism now isn't about "beating" the male population. I have no desire to see men downtrodden or inferior. But I can see that those elementary underpinnings influenced my feminist self because they involved the underlying assumption that I was just as good as the boys, if not better.

And that's basically Tina Fey's stance in Bossypants. She makes the great observation that people never ask Donald Trump how he can possibly be the boss of so many people, in the same way that people deprecatingly, whether intentionally or not, wonder to Tina all the time about how SHE manages being the boss of SO many people.

I'll have to think about and answer when I knew I was becoming a woman at some later date. But for this entry, I am a feminist because of my girlfriends, because I think women are undercelebrated, because of Jane Eyre, Marians, Tina Fey, Bluestockings, short skirts, poetry, emotions, sisterhood, POWER.