womanhood

Womanhood Diaries, Vol. 8: Woman on an Island

Posted on May 5, 2026May 5, 2026 by Tasha

Every morning for the past four months has started the same way: me alone in my bed, typing my deepest traumas on a laptop—then starting work, hunched over another screen, feeling like a brick is sitting in my stomach.

Two screens mirroring tragedies: one from the past, and one that still rises every time I log in to work and realize I’m living a double life.

My life plays backward like a horror movie — blood on my hands, toes curling. I’ve seen this scene before. I try to warn the girl before she’s bludgeoned to death. Then I realize: the girl is me.

Before I started this book-writing process, I imagined myself typing in cute coffee shops. Sometimes that happens. More often, writing looks like the morning after a night of partying— only I have no fun stories of dancing on tabletops to explain my disheveled look. I stumble to the kitchen, make coffee, write in my pajamas, hair uncombed.

Writing and I are in a torturous love affair. We get it on, anywhere: five minutes between work projects, the gym parking lot, a supermarket aisle, if I’m feeling adventurous. Nothing about this life feels glamorous.

I am a woman on an island. Equal parts liberated and maddened.

But the beauty of this solitude is that without the noise, I’m slowly returning to myself. Once you’ve seen what you’ve survived and named the harm, you’re not so easily shaken. You will claw at anything that invades your path because this time, you see pain’s footprints coming.

You become the pretty monster.

This writing island is lonely. These past few months, I have cut off friends and ghosted dates who tried to overstep my boundaries.

Nice girls don’t survive here.

Womanhood Diaries, Vol. 6: Good Girls Don’t Eat Doughnuts

Posted on April 19, 2026May 17, 2026 by Tasha

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

Most artists imagine their audience as they create. I envision a woman’s fingers gliding across the pages of my book while I write this collection. She is a woman like me—unstitched by life’s trials, then sewn back together by her own hands, pain as her thread.

This week, I wrote about desire, learning how to hold it without fear. That’s when I noticed I hadn’t had a cookie or a piece of cake in nearly a year. Years of discipline had hardened into deprivation, and my body had learned to override its wanting to be “good.”

Good was controlling my weight so it didn’t offend others.
Good was practicing restraint at all times.
Good was denying myself and calling it self-control.

As the piece unfolded, I spoke with a man who told me his marriage ended because his ex-wife wouldn’t fall in line under his leadership. Later, he told me I wasn’t his type physically.

For a moment, his words hovered over my chest. I thought about the years I starved, the years I stood in the mirror hating my reflection. Then I thought about the permission slips I’d handed myself these past few months. After a devastating breakup last year, I had finally learned to sip from the overflow of my own cup.

I brushed his words over my shoulder and laughed.

The cellulite on my thighs and the stretch marks across my hips had been earned—war wounds of time. Their beauty was undeniable.

Restraint never won me any prizes. Desire makes me whole again.

Womanhood Diaries, Vol. 5: Prince Charming Carries a Knife

Posted on April 12, 2026April 12, 2026 by Tasha

There was a time when I believed in a savior—Prince Charming, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny.

Soon, I learned Santa Claus was a story designed to control my behavior. If I were a “good little girl,” I would get the most presents. Prince Charming—the hero who rescues the helpless woman—was another fabricated tale, packaging love as salvation.

And still, some of us find comfort in the delusion.

At fifteen, my best friend met a man she believed was her Prince Charming. That illusion shattered the night he held a knife to her throat. I begged her to stay with my family a little longer. One evening, bleary-eyed, she told me she missed him. The next day, she went back as if magic were hidden in his back pocket.

I never heard from her again.

I spent nights afterward stewing in guilt because I could not save her. I told myself that if I had tried harder, shouted louder, loved her better, she would have stayed.

Four years later, I was the one shouting for help, pinned against a car in a parking lot while people stood nearby, silent, turning their heads. More than twenty years later, I still wake up screaming for that woman.

That was the first time I understood something every woman must eventually admit to herself: No one is coming to save me.

No Santa Claus.
No Easter Bunny.
And definitely, no Prince Charming.

So I wrote my way back to myself.

Writing gave me a place to unpack shame, to set down self-blame. I wrote about the things that hurt me, the things that made me angry. I found power in naming the tiny violences committed against me—even if it took decades to say it out loud.