I grieve for us because you and I never got to experience that euphoria. Instead, our connection was severed immediately upon my arrival. They ripped me from your arms and determined our destiny without consulting us. They second-guessed your abilities because of your disability. Our society, built on a supremacy of able-bodied whiteness, decided that your disability, your race, and your class were inferior and treated you as such. They stole your autonomy over your body and they stole my only need as a baby in the process: my maternal connection with the only mother my newborn self knew.

So, I’ve somehow arrived here. I blinked. It’s 10 years later. I’ve reached the age that I used to tell myself would be the magical age when everything would finally feel aligned. I’m here. And, so very little feels aligned.

If you had asked me a week ago if I knew what a trad wife was, I would have stared at you with a dumbfounded look on my face. I had never heard that term before. Honestly? I still wish I didn’t know. I would love to travel back in time to about seven days ago when my ignorance of what a trad wife is was strong. Sometimes, ignorance truly is bliss. But, alas, I now know what a trad wife is. I can thank TikTok for that. Someone mentioned this trad wife movement on another social media app, and in an effort to cure my ignorance, and at the risk of screwing up my algorithm, I took to TikTok to teach me about this odd phenomenon of trad wife-ism.

I often have to remind myself that Beyoncé is a regular human like me. She has arms and legs, fingers and toes, fears and worries, anxiety and peace, grief and joy — just like the rest of us. The genius of her work is proof that she is in a league all her own, not because she is some beyond-human species that is above the rest of us, but because she put herself there.

I always feel as though I am in the middle of a game of tug-of-war. Each of my arms is one side of the rope and my body plays the role of the middle. The pressure of consistency and my mixed feelings about the desire for success pull one side of me, and my humanity and limited capacity pull the other.

It’s Women’s History Month — what honest progress can we say we’ve made in the lives of American women, especially American mothers? To answer this question, we must be honest about the direct correlation between white supremacy and womanhood and motherhood in the United States.

It’s okay to feel fear, anxiety, or overwhelm when participating in advocacy work of any kind. This is far from easy, which is why most people choose silence. Silence is comfortable. Silence is safe. Advocacy work is rarely comfortable. And, sometimes, advocacy work is not safe. There are real threats to this work that must be taken seriously, and protecting your mental well-being is crucial. You should never push yourself to the brink of burnout or sacrifice your mental state in your advocacy work. Breaks are key. Self-care is non-negotiable.

Our society’s desperation to keep whiteness and white people in power has not come without a grave cost to everyone who inhabits this society. That means you. And that means me. It is because of white supremacy that we have built a society that refuses more help to its citizens than any other developed nation in this world. It is because of white supremacy that we have withheld the human rights to safety, security, education, health care, public resources, child care, and more. It is white supremacy that wrote the very American narrative that even your most basic human rights must be deserved and earned.

Each of these characteristics can be traced back to the foundations and development of white supremacy to the society and culture we live in today. These traits have emerged from the development of white supremacy. They are the result of it.

America has defined itself as a country based on a race-based hierarchy that, through almost every structure, law, ordinance, and standard set by elite white men, is reinforced by class, education, land ownership, gender, and even beauty. Desperate to maintain the supremacy of whiteness, (specifically male-dominated whiteness), America provided handouts to white men, restricted access to everyone else, and told the lie that the success the white men experienced was solely based on meritocracy.

This obsession with production and perfection seeps into every facet of our lives — from our education to our careers to our parenting. It is inescapable. If you are not incessantly trying to outperform your counterparts and yourself every day, society will shout at you from every angle about how much of a failure you are. Sitting down is out of the question. Rest is for the lazy and weak. There is always more to do, more to be, and more to chase. You are never enough in our society, and society reminds us of that every single day.

Now, I’m not saying that having goals, aspirations, and even a to-do list is destroying your self-worth and that we must get rid of it all. That would be ridiculous and a little extreme. I live by a good to-do list, otherwise, I would not remember whether I’m coming or going on a daily basis. The problem lies with our culture. Its historic roots in white supremacy created our modern-day human hierarchical culture that measures your worth based on your race, gender identity, class, ability, and participation in capitalism. This culture takes one look at your humanity and demonizes you for it.

It is okay to live in the tension of the both/and. It is okay to feel the heartache, the guilt, the desperation and recognize that ignoring your needs and your life is not what will save the lives of those who are fighting for theirs. Yes, it is so unfair that thousands of beautiful, innocent people can no longer live their lives as they were once able to, just as we are now. That truth also applies to many other similar circumstances that are unrelated to an unprecedented present-day massacre.

It is not a coincidence that we are a society of humans walking around in a worthiness-chasing daze. Our society has destroyed our self-worth, convinced us that it’s our fault we don’t feel worthy, and has brainwashed us into normalizing toxic traits and behaviors in order to “earn that worthiness.”