Did y’all have a nice March? Mine was spent traveling, up and down the east coast and all over Georgia. Some trips I really wanted to take and some I absolutely did not. But, as an added bonus, I learned first hand if you think you have a conference in Covington, Geogria that is not the same thing as actually having a conference in Carrollton, Georgia. They’re separated by about an hour and a half of panicked driving through rush hour Atlanta.
My blog posts run about a month behind my actual crafty progress and since most of February was spent sweating over a project I’m not quite ready to share, March was a fallow month here.
I did finally get around to making some samplers that I’ve been dreaming about since January.
January was when I read Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, and fell head over heels for an essay on being friends with other women. For most of high school and a little while afterwards I claimed to prefer being friends with guys. I thought it made me cool and edgy to say that boys were less drama, and I didn’t like girly things anyway, so why would I want to hang out with girls? Now, I love my dude friends, they’re fantastic men, but to say that it’s easier to be friends with them than women, or that they are in any way less drama is absolute bullshit.
I have, and I think a lot of us have, a pretty deep socialized shame about being a woman and liking “girly” things, and it’s a damn disgrace that I let that shame or fear of being considered a “typical girl” scare me away from forming meaningful friendships with more women earlier in my life. I feel like I’m always trying to unlearn the problematic shit that I’ve internalized and this particular battle, to not automatically associate the feminine as wrong or less than, is one of my harder battles.
But here’s the thing, this past year, the one that was so hard? I only got through it with the support and love of the women in my life. I have three girlfriends who I leaned on especially hard in 2014. I wanted a way to let these women know how important they are to me, and how much I appreciated their ongoing, unconditional love. Reading Roxane’s essay on being friends with women struck me as particularly heartfelt, funny and true.
These samplers, qui se ressemble s’assemble, come from some advice Roxane’s french speaking Haitian mother gives her; they mean, roughly, you are who you surround yourself with.
And I’ve surrounded myself with the very best people.
Yady Kates 