Introductions are just the worst. They’re seriously so awkward, but let’s face it, they’re kinda super crucial. So here I am! A grown ass woman, doing her best impression of a human adult.
Hi! My name is Ryn, and I wear a lot of hats. I could fill a whole room with all of the figurative hats I wear on a daily basis, or at the very least a few hypothetical coat racks.
Here’s a list of what some of my hats would say if they were real and not a convoluted mess of a metaphor:
- Beware the Bipolar Vortex
- Make America Femme Again
- Puts the Pan in Pansexual
- unpaid novelist
- poly pocket
- call center cyborg
- recovering nail biter
- never crochet the gay away
- Dick Flicks Podcast co-host
- college dropout
- 24, Awkward, And Thriving(?)
- hoosier who
- feminist warlord
- cat collector
- nonsensical list maker
- seriously, she can’t stop
- what was the point of this again?
- clearly doesn’t understand the limited space on a hat
One year ago, I wore my favorite hat of all… my pussy hat*. Shila (my fiancee and co-writer of this blog) and I drove to D.C., marched among millions of women around the world, then turned around and drove home to Indiana. It was a powerful day in the midst of a discouraging year. I hope today is the inverse.
* I recently read the perspective that pussy hats are felt by some women/non binary people to be racist and transphobic. I truly apologize. I won’t try to explain my experience, I just want to be clear that I care more than anything that I keep learning and growing to be as intersectional in my feminism as possible. I know that as a white cis-gendered woman, it is a sign of my deep privilege that I didn’t realize this in 2017. These photos matter a lot to me, but they are problematic, and I am so sorry to have behaved in a way that made others feel excluded, especially since they are the most mistreated and overlooked. I was marching for you, and I always will be.
The Fourth Leaf 