I was recently asked this question.
In what ways do you feel beautiful?
I expected to hesitate. Beauty is a word we learn early and often incorrectly—measured, ranked, compared. Something to achieve. Something to maintain.
But when I sat with it, the answer came easily.
I feel beautiful when I am surrounded by beautiful women. Not beautiful in the narrow way we were taught to understand it. Not curated or filtered. I mean beautiful in the way a woman is when she is fully inside her life.
I am the kind of person who absorbs the energy of the table I sit at, so I choose my tables carefully. When I am with women who are building something—businesses, homes, art, movements—I feel my own posture change.
When I listen to women speak clearly about their work, their boundaries, their desires, something in me expands.
Beauty, for me, is contagious.
It looks like women tending their gardens before the sun is harsh. Women kneading dough in quiet kitchens. Women running meetings. Women running households.
Women raising children. Women deciding not to. Women who love gently. Women who love fiercely.
Women who are silent but steady. Women who are outspoken and unapologetic.
Women who are modest. Women who are loud.
Come as you are.
There was a time when another woman’s beauty felt like competition. We were taught that there was only room for one—that attention was scarce, that comparison was natural.
That script no longer fits.
Now, I hold hands with my sisters. I borrow courage from them and offer mine in return. We share a quiet vision: a world where girls grow up safe, where women are celebrated, not threatened, and where we do not have to shrink to belong.
What makes me feel beautiful is not a mirror. It is the presence of women who reflect possibility back to me.
A friend who says she is proud and means it. A woman twice my age who shares her story without apology. Someone younger who trusts my advice. A table where no one is posturing.
In those moments, beauty feels collective.
It feels like solidarity. Like shared laughter. Like strength passed across the table without keeping score.
And the promise matters too—that I am not only receiving this energy, but giving it back.
That I am also someone’s safe space. Someone’s encouragement. Someone’s reminder that softness and strength can coexist.
So for Women’s Month, I return to the question.
In what ways do you feel beautiful?
Maybe it is not in the mirror. Maybe it is in the lineage.
In the sister who steadies your voice.
In the mother who taught you resilience, whether by example or by warning.
In the elder who showed you that power can be quiet.
In the younger girl watching how you take up space.
Beauty, I am learning, is communal. It is matriarchal. It is built in circles, not spotlights.
It is the garden tended together. The table extended. The hand held without condition.
Here’s to sisterhood that does not compete.
To motherhood in all its forms—biological, chosen, symbolic.
To the kind of matriarchy that protects, nurtures, and leads without erasing.
May we continue to raise one another.
May we become the women we once needed.
And may we always remember that we are most beautiful when we stand together.
