Podcast Alert - I don’t want to be important. I want to be powerful.
A Woman's Relationshop with Post-Patriarcal power
Women are trained to be suspicious of that sentence.
We are allowed to want to help. We are allowed to serve, nurture, organize, encourage, support, repair, and carry. We are permitted to take responsibility for nearly everything—as long as we don’t become too interested in possessing the authority, money, reach, or influence required to determine what happens next.
We are trusted with responsibility long before we are trusted with power.
Women do much of the work that makes life livable. We anticipate needs. We notice consequences. We understand that decisions happen inside bodies, families, relationships, communities, and ecosystems—not only on spreadsheets.
These are not merely “soft skills.” They are governing capacities.
I don’t believe women are born morally superior to men. Women can misuse power. Women can exploit, dominate, abandon, and destroy.
But many women have been trained—often through necessity—to pay attention to the human cost of decisions. We have lived closer to vulnerability, invisible labor, caregiving, social consequences, and the daily work of holding things together.
That experience can make women exceptionally capable of carrying power in ways that make life more livable.
And yet we continue to confuse the refusal of domination with the refusal of power.
They are not the same.
Power does not have to mean standing over other people. It can mean having enough authority to interrupt harm. Enough money to move resources. Enough ownership to protect what matters. Enough reach to change the conversation. Enough influence to create better conditions.
Care without power becomes endless damage control.
Power without care becomes domination.
We need women willing to hold both.
This is my first podcast episode in nearly a year, and I came back because I wanted to talk about the kind of power women are taught not to want.
Not fame for the sake of recognition.
Not importance for the sake of being admired.
The power to build, protect, decide, distribute, and change the conditions surrounding us.
The future does not simply need more women standing adjacent to power, advising the people who possess it and cleaning up after the people who abuse it.
It needs women willing to possess power themselves.
