This is my favorite anniversary.

It’s the anniversary of the worst day of my life.

I was at one of these gatherings where everyone eats apples and almond butter and dances to dub step.

At the time, I was spending my days trying to find clarity.

And thus I found sound baths, the final frontier of spirituality.

That entire summer was spent on the festival circuit, bashing gongs from morning to night.

Lucidity was the first festival we worked that summer. By Sunday morning, I had been listening to the gongs crash for about 30 hours straight.

And that morning, I started to crack.

I kept thinking about women.

Not of women I knew, but women as a concept.

What an uncomfortable concept.

They seemed so vulnerable. And caring. It felt like they did all of the work for none of the credit. Cleaned up everyone else’s mess.

Historically, they held no power. Historically, there was childbirth and labor, rape and abuse.

Pain.

They killed themselves to look attractive, and once that was gone, seemed so discarded. Left to live vicariously through others, disrespected by their own children.

More pain.

From menarche to menopause. Pain, mortality, ephemerality, insignificance, sorrow.

“I hate them”, I realized.

I hated women.

I despised them. I was angry at them. I hated them mostly because others did, because they were reviled, their options were limited, and being a woman was a raw deal.

No way in hell I’m getting a raw deal.

I hated me.

I didn’t want to grow up. Growing up meant becoming a woman, and fuck no, that is not happening. I had to become some other sort of creature.

I hated myself.

To my core.

For who I fundamentally was.

All this time, I had thought the challenge was in the outside world. That I had to prove to everyone else how awesome women are, and rid the world of misogyny.

But no. Because the battle was internal. Because although I fancied myself a warrior for women’s empowerment, deep down, I was the misogynist.

I had a deep, rooted, unquestionable hatred for women.

And I have woken up, and fallen asleep, and showered with this hatred every day, for years and years and years.

It sucked.

It seriously sucked.

As far as realizations go, this was the worst one of my life. “Sorry” doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt.

I spent the rest of the day, literally, crying on the ground.

At a certain points time, the two massage therapists in the healing space checked up on me.

They offered to do bodywork on me, and I accepted. And this was a true festival scene, one person massaging a sobbing woman’s feet while another person massaged her head.

Puffy faced, wailing about misogyny.

They helped. Still, that day sucked.

But it was also one of the best days of my life.

Because once I fully faced the internal monster that had been haunting me all of these years, I brought it from the realm of the unseen and uncontrollable to the lucid and manageable.

I could face it. And I could choose to change.

That was two years ago.

And, for the second year in a row, I’m heading back to the same event this weekend.

And quite honestly- I hope I have a terrible time. If that’s what it takes.

I hope I have whatever experience will cause me to grow.