She's so brave! Her courage to be out there and so visible is so inspiring! She has the guts to put herself forward!
She's not brave! Her visibility is not driven by courage! She's not putting herself forward because she has the guts!
She's making herself visible because she finally realised that she deserves to occupy the space she's in and more.
She had the epiphany one day that she's allowed, no, entitled, to expand out of her tiny sandbox space that the world has assigned to her.
She finally realised that her sandbox just couldn't contain her amazingness anymore. She knew she had to expand outside of it or she would implode.
It wasn't courage that drove her. It was desparation. Because she had tried EVERYTHING to realise herself within the confines of that sandbox. The sandbox that the world had assigned and allocated for her.
The sandbox that she was supposed to live out the rest of her life. Because while she was confined to the boundaries of that box, the world was safe from her brilliance, from her light.
She was convinced from the get go that her light was something that had to be contained for the comfort of humanity.
By the time she was an adult, she believed that her brilliance, her amazingness, her power was dangerous. The world didn't need to keep her in bounds. She did an excellent job of that herself.
Except …
she was dying on the inside. For a long time.
She felt the urge to challenge those bounds but she was scared shitless. She didn't know what will happpen after.
First she started asking why those bounds were put on her and by whom. The world couldn't give her an answer.
The world didn't give a single fuck about the fact that she bound and she was wasting away.
She knew that if she wanted to live and not just exist, she had to remove those bounds herself.
She knew it wasn't going to be easy because the world taught her that she was weak. She was not made for the firey, explosive, soul shattering stuff she started to believed she had in her.
So she went out, into the dark. By herself. With that little flame she was nurturing, kindling, caring for for a while now. Because it was better for her to walk her own path, even if in the dark, than to walk someon elses with all the others who were still bound.
In the dark she walked for a while, scared out of her wits but knowing it was the right decision. Then she came across someone else who was like her.
She now had a sister to nurture and kindle their rebellious flame with. Someone else who found the bounds of their sandbox suffocating and wanted to expand out of it as much as she did.
And there were two. Their flame was now bigger and was lighting up the darkness and then others started to see it and join them.
And that flame grew and grew and their light grew and grew. And they were beginning to be seen and heard by more and more of their sisters and from further and further away.
Her rebellious movement of expansion and her absolute and utter conviction that she deserved all the space she wanted in the world has grown so big that the world couldn't deny her existence anymore.
She looked around and saw that what she was expanding into was infinite space. No limits, no boundaries, no rules. She saw all the others who were following her example.
Not her example courage but her belief that she was worthy of being more than those parameters meted out to her by people who's interest it was to keep her small.
So she waved to them to walk with her and she lead them into that limitless, unbounded space where they all unfurled their brilliance, from beginning to end, heart and soul.
And then her work was done. For now.
Andrea is a priestess and torchbearer for those who want to break out of their bounds and claim their rightful place in the world with their work. And, she is dedicated to lighting the path ahead and reacquainting today’s women with their power.