In the name of peace, I held my tongue until my lips bled lies, silencing my truth and my voice. For what? To make life easier for those around me? To be more lovable? More acceptable? That’s what they teach us, the wild women with the wide open hearts. They train us that our silence, compliance and conformity buys love and acceptance. That the path to our happiness is littered with our obedience. To be gentle, quiet and complacent is to be feminine. We were told to hide our voice, our desires, and our purpose from those without the eyes to see thinking that somehow we will magically become tolerable. What a load of crap. Women have been swallowing their truth, their talents and their desires for WAY too long. We did it in the name of being acceptable by society. We did it to be loved by others. We did it to survive in a world that tried to burn us to the ground. Guess what? The flames didn’t work, it only made us burn brighter. You can’t silence the feminine; she only comes back stronger than before, breathing holy wildfire. You will never destroy us. There is no power great enough. I will not lessen my desires to become digestible. I will not silence my truth to make life easier for those around me. I will not see myself as unworthy because the patriarchy brainwashed me to believe it. I will not believe that I need to conform in order to be worthy of love. I will be sparkling sunshine and raging hurricane knowing that both powers lie within me. I will choose who I warm to the core or who I blow to the ground. The world needs your roar. Your sisters need to hear it, to be inspired by it and to see it in action. Continued silence only buys us more bondage. We need to know that we are our own salvation. We will not go gentle into that dark night. We will fight. We will roar. We will love. And we will burn, passionately in the light of our truth. My divine right is not fitting perfectly into a society that would make me conform. It is not eternal beauty. It is not to be a breeding ground and midwife to the poison of the past. No, my divine right is truth. It is love. It is freedom. And the more we realize that each of us in born deserving of this and speak up, the more we shall rise. I am a Queen. I am a Warrior. I am a freaking Amazon. I am a woman dammit. And I won’t be silenced ever again.~ ~Ara Campbell