Molly Simpson

I have a few friends that I refer to as world expanders. It’s a concept I’ve been talking about a lot lately as I keep collecting more of them, more people who make life bigger and more exciting. This is the type of person that makes you want to go out and do. I think there’s an equally important type of friend to have though, and that’s the world

The thing about being: a daughter, a mother, a sister, a friend, a girl, a woman — all of it, is that we each come with a unique set of matches, functional only to the experience of another woman. And in some ways, I think we have to light each other on fire to learn how to actually use our matches, to learn that we can also light each other up.

On

What was the goal of experience, aside from some feminist reclamation? It was an attempt to encounter as much of the world as possible, to soak up otherness and change as much as we possibly could; part of the inadequacy of living in this pursuit was the futility of trying to escape ourselves. “We really wish to be multiple,” Greif wrote in 2005.

Changing your mind can be a choice, but it’s not a decision. We don’t decide to change our minds; it’s more full-bodied than that. Changing our minds is a nuisance. It means rewiring countless associations and links between things, disconnecting and reconnecting dots.

We don’t decide to do this (why would we willingly, repeatedly put ourselves