Our truest, most essential selves

In America, our girlfriends teach us what love, trust, and desire are; they hold our hands as we navigate the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of culture. With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else — family, lovers, husbands, or children — we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because — and this is the meat of the matter — it’s hard work to be a woman.

Chelsea G. Summers – A Certain Hunger