As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think. There’s a lot packed into that one line. Every time I read it, I hear Toni Morrison’s voice. I hear her telling me to respect my own dreams and to trust my instincts before I allow self-doubt and overthinking to highjack my vision.

Stop whining. Are you going to be a doomed prophetess, or are you going to find a different voice and save your city?”

It is time for us to be the scribes and the teachers of a new way—to

It’s about doing power differently.

History isn’t what happened. It’s who tells the story. —Sally Roesch Wagner

All I know is that in my early thirties I became acutely aware of the feelings of constriction, heartache, and anger that had been brewing in me since I was a girl. Slowly, the desire to do something to change the story became stronger than my fear of speaking up.

the old stories haunt us still: religious tales where the women are fickle, or weak, or cursed; fairy tales where the men are white knights and swashbuckling saviors, bad boys and lone wolves, warriors and kings. And where the women are ugly hags and scullery maids, or sleeping beauties and girls locked in towers.

one that sets all the others up, the first story to paint womankind as “second in creation, and first to sin.”

Toni Morrison told a truer narrative, and in doing so the meager foundations of Western storytelling began to crumble.