Sometime around the year 2000, maybe even the late nineties, there was a bulletin board on Ms. Magazine.
It was the very early days of the interwebs, and there was a group of women on there that I stalked, because I didn't really participate much. I would just read their posts and watch them exchange tips and information and counsel and advice.
It completely transformed my life.
I still remember some of their handles. I will never know their real names.
They were talking about things like how diet impacts your mental health. On Ms. Magazine, at least twenty-six years ago, if not longer. What?!? I had never heard of those connections before, of the impact that sugar has on your body, of how different kinds of diet have different kinds of impacts on your system.
I read women discussing their sex lives with physical impediments, and how they worked around it to still have a super satisfying sex life. I heard about women being abused at work and what they were doing to get out of the situation, or to change it.
And I was just, like, watching with my jaw open, learning, soaking it all in, because I had no idea that there was a language for so many of the things that so many of us have experienced. Or that there were solutions available. Every one of those things felt like an individual problem, and there were these women treating them as shared, and solvable.
So what that bulletin board provided was a tiny little window into a universe of opportunity and possibility and openness and solutions and camaraderie and solidarity that would never have existed otherwise.
Now, I don't even know that Gloria Steinem knew what was in the bulletin board of the online version of the magazine she started. She probably did. I have no idea.
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I'm mentioning it because I'm so sad about her passing last week. She had such a huge impact on my life and on so many feminists' lives, and the impact is so much more complex and deep and nuanced than she could have ever known.
And granted, it's easy for somebody to say "Gloria Steinem had a big impact on my life," because she's freaking Gloria Steinem, right?
But the point of my story today is that we are everybody else's Gloria Steinems, potentially.
In other words, do I think Gloria Steinem was on that bulletin board, and she knew how excited I was about learning all of these things that her readers were discussing? Probably not. But without her, that wouldn't have happened.
So am I having a huge impact on people's lives and being famous like Gloria Steinem? Absolutely not. But do I believe that by my sheer existence I can have a positive impact in the world? Yes.
Do I have evidence? It doesn't matter. That's my point.
We don't need evidence to act as if we matter. We don't need evidence to act as if what we put out into the world is received with open arms by people who need it, people that we may never even meet. We don't need to justify our existence to believe that it is sacred. We don't need to understand it intellectually to sense that it might be having a huge emotional impact on somebody, or on many somebodies.
So while this is my super little humble tribute to Gloria Steinem, and to one dinky little corner of her entire universe of work, it was so impactful. And I wanna believe that we can all have that kind of impact on each other.
Mind you, you may not be out there writing books or leading rallies or building media companies, but you are uniquely positioned to talk about exactly how you've made it this far today, and that might be all that somebody needs.