For the witches. For the priestesses.

For all the women who feel at once invisible and unimaginably potent.

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They say you can’t be what you can’t see.

Well, I am beginning to be something I don’t really see celebrated out there. Or at least, something I don’t see celebrated enough, and something many can’t seem to see at all, even when it’s right in front of them.

So I’m writing this for the others like me. The women who are stepping into a strange power. A power they don’t really understand themselves, and which doesn’t seem to originate in them. A power that seems to be flowing through them from some elemental source.

I’m writing this now, this week, because we’re entering a challenging season for women like us. If you haven’t built the typical life, the holiday season can be difficult, and many of us haven’t built the typical life. We don’t have the spouse and the house with a garage and the two children and the Labrador. Many of us have had to spend the first half of our lives fighting just to become ourselves. We’ve had to live into and through ancestral inheritances and learn to stand up in bodies and souls that feel alien and alienated in a punitively normative world. We’ve been outcasts and weirdos; we’ve struggled with our mental health and with addictions and with bad relationships because we didn’t know what we were, we didn’t know our value, nobody was telling us that we were needed in all our weirdness. That we were needed for all our weirdness.

We talk a lot these days about how invisible mothers are, but do you know who is even more invisible than mothers? Childless women who are caring for everyone around them—who are yes, mothering everyone around them—and who don’t get to call ourselves mothers. Women who are pouring themselves out to care for those around them while also building something other than a family—something most people don’t even notice or recognize. Who are letting some elemental form of art or love or protest flow through them to create something vital, something that is changing the world but which nobody’s ever going to ask about over Thanksgiving lunch or Christmas dinner.

As a single, childless woman approaching forty, I have begun to feel like glue. Like invisible superglue, forever silently holding communities together, showing up to help people with their lives and their families. And I am happy to do this. I’m delighted, in fact. Like many women in my position, I take great joy in my communities and in being a friend and an auntie.

But at the end of the day, when we’ve lent whatever energy we can to others who need it, the things we are building ourselves all too often remain invisible and unsupported.

Because there aren’t categories for what we’re doing. Because our lives and the ways we’re living them make people uncomfortable. Because people look at us and see only what we don’t have, and not the wildly rich, expansive, revolutionary connections and worlds and creations we are building outside of the mainstream.

But I see. I see it in the goddess women all around me who are right now channelling this strange power. Who are struggling with feeling at the same time invisible and unimaginably potent.

Yes, I see all you do to support those around you—but I see that you’re so much more than that too.

I see you metabolizing the world’s unfelt pain. I see the way you step in and feel what others aren’t prepared to feel. I see that this is a service that is essential in the world’s unfolding in this moment. That your willingness to do this is getting us all unstuck.

I see you in the silent hours, devoting yourself to art, to activism, to education, to nurturing the living world.

I see you bridging the material world and the beyond.

I see you searching for new, more life-giving ways of living and thinking and feeling. I see you pressing at the edges of what’s possible.

I see you refusing the smallness that was handed to you. I see you fighting to be allowed to live at your rightful size and pace.

I see you seeking.

I see you birthing a new world.

You are not just glue. You are not invisible.

You are your own precious thing.

You are a column of pure light, a channel of bright life force.

You are change.

You are a priestess.

And don’t forget it.

Love,

xx Ellie