Women With Swords is about becoming the kind of person who doesn’t need rescuing.
The name comes from an old image — someone standing alone with a blade, unafraid, answering to no one. Joan of Arc heard voices no one else could and rode into battle on the strength of them anyway. Women who heard voices like that, throughout most of history, weren’t handed armor for it — they were drowned, burned, institutionalized, or quietly written out of the story. The line between “witch” and “warrior” was never really about what a woman did. It was about who got to decide whether she’d be punished or believed.
I have a tattoo of a naked woman on horseback, sword raised. I also have a switchblade tattoo on the inside of my wrist — hidden, on purpose, in the place where a pulse is. Neither is decorative. They’re reminders that the fight is usually private before it’s ever visible, and that protecting yourself doesn’t require anyone’s permission.
This blog isn’t about any one battle. It’s about the ordinary, unglamorous difficulty of being a person making hard choices in a world that has never made those choices easy — the double standards, the double binds, the way so much of what we call “strength” in women was first called “hysteria,” “too much,” or “difficult.” It’s about sorority as its own kind of weapon: the specific, underrated power of women telling each other the truth, showing up for each other, and refusing to let isolation do what it’s always tried to do. From the women burned for knowing things they weren’t supposed to know, to the ones riding into their own versions of battle now — this is one long, unbroken lineage, and I think we’re all still in it.
Essentially, think Carrie Bradshaw with a Simone de Beauvoir and Joan of Arc twist.
I’m 28. I just got out of a 10 year coercive relationship with a man 8 years older than me. We are in the process of divorcing and he is asking me for spousal support. Yes, you read that right. As you can see, I’m still figuring a lot of this out. This is the record of that.
Women With Swords 