Women Like This

Day 143 – April 15, 2026

I have learned so much from women like this. And I don’t mean in the vague inspirational sense where somebody says “women are powerful” and everybody nods like they have just solved gender and existence in one reusable slogan.

I mean specifically. The women in my life. I mean women who are badass enough to tell the truth, gorgeous enough to stop a room, and real enough not to confuse either of those things with the whole point.

I admire them so much.

Not in a distant way. In a lived in way. In a grateful way. In a way that gets under the skin and quietly alters your standards for what love, friendship, loyalty, and feminine power are supposed to feel like.

Because women like this do not just show up. They show up correctly.

They love me. Protect me. See me. Hear me. Accept me. Encourage me. Challenge me.

That last one is huge.

Because being loved by women who challenge you without trying to dominate you is one of the greatest luxuries I know. They don’t challenge me to make me smaller. They challenge me because they see how much more of myself I am capable of inhabiting. They call me up, not out. They make me sharper, not harder. They remind me who I am when I start slipping into old patterns of shrinking, doubting, overexplaining, or trying to carry too much with perfect lipstick and no complaint.

That is love. And it’s a form of protection too.

I think that’s what moves me most, actually. The protection. Not in a macho, theatrical, chest beating way. In the feminine way. The deep way. The way women protect each other by witnessing clearly, speaking honestly, standing near, naming what’s real, refusing to let each other disappear into lies, men, fear, shame, or smaller versions of ourselves.

That kind of protection has changed my life. Especially after everything.

Because what happened to me did not just hurt me. It complicated my relationship to trust, belonging, safety, being held, being seen, being allowed to relax without paying for it later. And then these women, gorgeous, funny, brilliant, challenging, loving women, keep showing me that there are still rooms where I do not have to negotiate my humanity.

There are still people who know how to love me without agenda.

That is everything.

And yes, they are also just unbelievably beautiful. Inside and out. The kind of women whose beauty has texture. Personality. History. Bite. Not just faces or bodies or aesthetics, though obviously yes, all of that too. I mean the kind of beauty that arrives with courage, wit, opinions, scars, loyalty, and a complete unwillingness to be spiritually beige.

My kind of women. Roger also, clearly, agrees.

He has the kind of taste in women that suggests he understands quality when he sees it. He does not hand out his giant pit bull heart carelessly, and when he loves someone, he loves with the full dramatic sincerity of a creature who believes affection should be direct, constant, and ideally accompanied by snacks.

Honestly? Correct.

And maybe that’s what I’m trying to say. Women like this make life feel more possible. They make womanhood feel less lonely. They make healing feel less sterile. They make laughter feel like medicine. They make love feel intelligent. They make me want to become more myself, not less.

That’s rare. That’s power.

And I think a lot of what I’m becoming right now has their fingerprints on it in the most beautiful way. Not because I am becoming them. Because being loved by women like this is teaching me to love myself with better taste.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And women like this still raising the standard for what it means to be loved correctly.