I wrote my first novel at a time when I felt powerless. I was 27 in 2016, and there was a public reckoning happening with women’s bodies, but also a reckoning I was grappling with personally. I had felt so powerless in my body for such a long time that by then there was a comfort to be found in passivity, in going through the motions. I was dimly aware that there was another, stronger me somewhere, but I could barely see or remember her. I felt skinless, afraid.

Writing a book laid bare my own reckoning, made me feel worse for a time. But it also opened me to the experience of bridging the gap between powerlessness and power. I wrote, and people read — my words carried weight. Similarly, to have a body, especially as a woman, means to experience that space between power and powerlessness, as determined by the template on which the world has been built: a cisgender white man’s body.

Consider how much strength is needed to deal with the onslaught of living in a world rife with misogyny, the mental load of constant damage assessments. In that light, the idea of feminine weakness comes across as no more than a scam, a purposeful downplaying of the power embedded within the historic (and current) concept of the hysterical woman, the terrifying woman, righteously angry.

We cannot escape the fact that non-male pain is consistently underestimated. This is well documented, even in a world where measuring pain is nebulous, necessarily contingent on personal levels of what is bearable. I have seen my own friends disregarded by doctors again and again. One, for example, was told by a male doctor that she was overreacting to the pain of a ruptured cyst the size of an orange. Men present with heart attacks differently from women, and so their cardiac events are often missed. This is power. I hear and read stories of miscarriage, of labor injuries that caused broken pelvises, PTSD, incontinence, but I have to search them out, I am told them in whispers, as if there is a conspiracy about talking about these things. This is power, too.