Ungovernable

I am going to be honest with you this month, because honestly it is the only thing I have the patience for right now. To say that feminine rage is alive and well and stirring inside of me is an understatement. Not the performative kind. Not the kind you manage carefully so no one feels uncomfortable. The kind that sits in the chest like a live coal that has been there so long it has stopped burning and started simply existing as weight. The kind that arrives when you have been paying attention closely enough and long enough to understand exactly what you are looking at.

America’s lawmakers are at war with women. That is not hyperbole. That is not political commentary. That is what is happening, plainly and without apology, in real time. And most of it is outside of my control. I can vote. I can protest. I can write like this. But I cannot single-handedly dismantle what they are building in those chambers, and sitting with that powerlessness is its own particular kind of rage.
 

   | “America’s lawmakers are at war with women.”

Fifteen years of looking inward, unlearning, rebuilding. And in the last three years doing it with a rage that finally had a name. Fifteen years is not a hobby. It is a complete restructuring of the self. Done quietly, without applause, mostly without a roadmap, while the world keeps moving like none of it is happening.

And then watching a leadership so vile, so cartoonishly committed to every patriarchal value I had spent years excavating from my own body take the wheel and cast all of us into chaos.

The rage did not begin with the election. But the election made it impossible to be quiet about it anymore. This is what they have built in fifteen months.

Government. Reproductive rights dismantled. Bodily autonomy legislated by men who will never carry a pregnancy. Title IX protections rolled back. Diversity initiatives eliminated. Safety net programs gutted, the ones women and children depend on disproportionately. The SAVE Act, if passed, will disenfranchise millions of married women who do not have a birth certificate readily available to register to vote. This is not an oversight. It is architecture.

Law. In state after state, abortion is now banned outright. And in every single one of those states, the person who suffers the full legal, physical, and emotional consequences is the woman. Not the man who participated. Not the lawmakers who decided. The woman. The doctors who provide care are prosecuted. The patients who seek it are criminalized. The law has become today’s modern day witch hunt, and the target, as it has always been, is the woman who refuses to be controlled.

Medicine. Reproductive health care defunded. Clinics closed. Doctors threatened with prosecution for providing care they were trained to provide. Women are being turned away from emergency rooms, denied medication, and forced to carry pregnancies that will kill them because the law has decided it knows more than the body does.

Education. Multiple all girls schools bombed under this administration’s watch. Hundreds of young girls gone. Because a system organized around dominance has always understood that an educated woman is an ungovernable one. That is not collateral damage. That is a message.

Finance. One man is on the verge of becoming worth one trillion dollars while the administration he is aligned with strips the safety nets that millions of families depend on to survive. Contracts flow within the circle. Wealth consolidates upward at a pace that has no modern precedent. The wealth divide is not a side effect of the system. It is the system working exactly as designed.

Religion. The narrative from the pulpit is not subtle. Women belong at home. Bearing children. Deferring to their husbands. Obeying male authority as divine decree. Binary gender roles presented not as cultural preference but as God’s architecture. It is among the most effective mechanisms of control ever constructed because it does not ask for compliance. It sanctifies it. And the most radical contingent has stopped using metaphor entirely. They are calling him anointed by Christ. Some are calling him Christ. A man with multiple sexual assault convictions. That is what they are calling sacred.

Media. The president’s closest allies now own the platforms that shape public reality. What is broadcast is curated. What is curated is controlled. What is controlled is not news. It is propaganda wearing the costume of information. Inconvenient truths are buried. Convenient narratives are amplified. And the women who speak are the first to be silenced, discredited, or simply erased from the feed.

Religion. Government. Law. Medicine. Education. Finance. Media.
 

  | “Each institution a different door into the same building.”

What I can do is this.

I can grip the patriarchy by the balls, oops, I mean roots, in the only territory where I have complete authority. Myself. The place where the indoctrination lives so quietly it spent most of my life being mistaken for personality, for faith, for belief, for instinct. The place where I still catch myself shrinking. Where I still, occasionally, ask permission I was never required to ask. Where the conditioning runs so deep it stopped feeling like conditioning a long time ago and started feeling like simply the way I am.

It is not the way I am. And I am done living like it is.

That is what devotion means to me right now. Not softness. Not candles and journaling, though I will not pretend I do not love both. Devotion as refusal. Devotion as the daily, unglamorous, non-negotiable practice of living by what I actually believe instead of what I was handed.
 

      | “Devotion as refusal.“
 

This is what April is about.

Because here is what the rage clarified more than anything else. The system does not only live in Washington. It does not only live in the legislation or the headlines or the chambers where men make decisions about bodies they will never inhabit. It lives in me. In the way I was shaped before I had any say in the matter. And that version of it, the internal one, is the only place I actually have the power to do something about.

There is a word for it.

Internalized patriarchy is when the system no longer needs to enforce itself because the people inside it have learned to enforce it within themselves and each other. It is not imposed from the outside. It is reproduced from the inside, without awareness, without question, often without realizing it is happening at all.

It codes differently depending on who is carrying it. In women it shows up as self-regulation so practiced it feels like virtue. The voice that softens your tone before you speak. The response that calculates how your ambition will land before you allow yourself to fully feel it. The guilt that follows rest. The shame that follows desire. The doubt that greets your own knowing like a reflex you cannot seem to unlearn. In men it shows up as entitlement so normalized it reads as confidence. The unconscious assumption that his comfort, his leadership, his emotional needs take natural precedence. The performance of strength that has cost him, quietly and consistently, his full humanity.

The mechanism is identical regardless of gender. Absorb the rules. Reproduce the hierarchy. Police yourself and everyone around you accordingly.

And the coding does not stop at gender. A woman of color navigating these systems carries a compounded weight that a white woman does not. A Black woman. A Latina. An Asian woman. An Indigenous woman. Each moving through a system that has historically used race as an additional mechanism of control layered directly on top of gender. A queer woman moves through conditioning that tells her the very nature of her desire is wrong. A trans woman faces a system that refuses to recognize her existence as legitimate at all. The further a woman sits from the narrow definition of acceptable that patriarchy constructed, the heavier the indoctrination, the more sophisticated the self-policing required to survive inside it, and the more radical the unlearning.

This is not a footnote. It is the point.

The system did not create one version of the compliant woman. It created a hierarchy of them. And the women it most aggressively conditions are the ones it most fears.

And here is what makes this system particularly insidious. It does not just oppress women. It distorts everyone it touches. It gives men structural advantage while simultaneously imprisoning them emotionally, relationally, and spiritually. It hands them power in one hand and takes their wholeness with the other. Nobody chose this. Everybody inherited it. And that is precisely why dismantling it is not a war between men and women. It is a shared excavation of everything we were handed as truth that was never true at all.

But I want to be honest about something. The system does not distribute its harm equally. Women carry more of the weight, absorb more of the cost, and are asked to do more of the unlearning. That is not an opinion. That is the documented, measurable, undeniable reality of living inside a system organized around male dominance. Acknowledging that is not the same as indicting every man in the room. It is simply being precise about what we are dealing with.

The receipts exist.
Women are 51% of the population.
They do 66% of the world’s work.
They produce 50% of its food.
They own less than 20% of its land.
They head more than 80% of single-parent households.
And they give birth to 100% of the population.
That is not disparity.
That is a design.

The work then, the real work, is locating every place this lives inside you, every place conditioning learned to disguise itself as instinct, as personality, as virtue, and making a conscious, daily decision to refuse it. Not loudly. Not as spectacle. As practice. As the quiet, non-negotiable restructuring of how you move through your own life.

That is where sovereignty actually lives. Not in the protest, though the protest matters. Not in the think piece, though this is one. In the moment you catch the reflex before it becomes the action. In the moment you trust the knowing before you reach for permission. In the moment you choose, just once more, to live by what is actually true for you instead of what was handed to you as truth.

There is something that lives beneath the conditioning. Something that existed long before the world began attempting to shape her. Before she was taught to distrust her own knowing. Before she learned to make herself acceptable. Before she absorbed the rules of a system that was never organized around her flourishing. Something older than the stories she inherited about who she was supposed to be.

         |   “She was never absent. Only obscured.”
 

The divine feminine is life force moving through embodied intelligence. It lives in the body that recognizes truth instantly and in the spine that refuses to bend once it does. She is intuitive, cyclical, relational, creative, sovereign, sensual, discerning, generative, and protective. Not curated. Not aesthetic. Alive.

The divine feminine is intelligence. It is the knowing that arrives without credentials. The wisdom that does not require external validation to be true. The deep, embodied clarity that recognizes truth through sensation, intuition, and lived experience long before institutions attempt to name it.

Her authority was never granted by an institution because it was never theirs to grant in the first place. She does not derive legitimacy from systems that were built in her absence. She does not ask them for recognition.

This is not a mood board, a ritual, or a personality type. It is not the soft, agreeable archetype patriarchy declared the acceptable face of womanhood and then packaged into a thousand wellness products. That version was designed for consumption, simplified and sanitized until it could be sold back as empowerment. This is not that.

What patriarchy attempted was not erasure but distortion. It buried her beneath layers of story and doctrine and law. It burned texts. Destroyed temples. Criminalized healers. Rebranded goddesses as demons. Called intuition hysteria, rage instability, and knowing superstition. It attempted to sever women from the intelligence already living inside their bodies.

But distortion is not disappearance.

What lives in the body cannot be legislated out of existence. It cannot be erased by doctrine or rewritten by law. It can be obscured, doubted, suppressed, and misunderstood, but it cannot be removed from the place it originates.

And the reason the system worked so hard to obscure her is simple. A woman who trusts her own knowing does not need permission. And a woman who does not need permission cannot be organized into obedience.

What is happening now is not invention. It is recognition. The remembering of something that never left, something that has always been present, waiting for a woman to trust what she already knows.

This remembering is not a single moment. Not a revelation or ceremony or awakening, though it can feel like all of those things at once. It is practice. A daily, devotional return to the self that existed before the world attempted to define her. It is the decision, made again and again, to treat her rest as sacred. To reclaim her pleasure as birthright. To trust her intuition as intelligence. To measure success not by production but by the quality of the life she is actually living.

This is embodied strength. Not the performance of power. The lived experience of it. The quiet authority of a woman who moves through the world aligned with what she knows to be true.

She is not becoming powerful. She is remembering that she always was.

Before we go further, one clarification worth making. The divine feminine and the healed masculine are not assigned by gender. They are energies. Forces. Ways of moving through the world that live in every human being regardless of how they identify. Patriarchy distorted both. Healing restores both. What follows is not a conversation about men and women. It is a conversation about what becomes possible when both energies are free.

The healed masculine is presence moving through embodied responsibility.

Not dominance. Not control. Not the brittle performance of strength patriarchy taught men to wear like armor until they forgot there was anything underneath it. Presence. The kind that does not flinch when life becomes complicated. The kind that can sit in truth without needing to overpower it.

If the divine feminine is generative intelligence, the healed masculine is devoted structure. He is the spine that holds direction without collapsing into chaos or reaching for domination. His strength is not wielded over life. It is offered to it.
 

        |    “The healed masculine does not fear the feminine. He recognizes her.“
 

But to understand what the healed masculine is, it helps to name clearly what patriarchy made him instead. Because patriarchy did not elevate the masculine. It distorted it. It took natural masculine qualities, strength, direction, leadership, responsibility, and mutated them into something unrecognizable.

Strength became dominance. What was once the capacity to stabilize and protect became the compulsion to control. Leadership became entitlement. Emotional discipline became suppression, until the only emotion permitted was anger and the only expression of pain was force. Protection became possession. What was once the instinct to create safety became the legal and social ownership of women’s bodies, autonomy, and obedience. Brotherhood became competition. What was once solidarity among men became a constant measuring of status, conquest, and hierarchy.
 

       |   “Patriarchy did not protect the masculine. It weaponized it.“
 

And the cultural machine is still running. In living rooms and podcast studios and the earbuds of young men, the message is the same. Women are the reason you are lonely. Women are the reason you are failing. Women are the problem. The alpha bro pipeline is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a recruitment machine for every distortion named above. And it is working. Because a system that needs compliant women also needs angry men, and it has never been more efficient at producing both.

The men being fed that pipeline are not the enemy. They are the product. Boys who were never taught that their vulnerability was strength, that their emotions were intelligence, that their worth was not contingent on dominance. Boys who were handed a narrow, airless definition of what it meant to be a man and told that anything outside of it was weakness. The system conscripted them before they were old enough to question the terms.

He is not reclaiming power. He is remembering what strength was always for.

He understands that power does not come from control. It comes from responsibility. Responsibility for his actions. Responsibility for his impact. Responsibility for the structures he builds and the people they affect. Where patriarchy demanded obedience, the healed masculine practices stewardship. Where patriarchy pursued conquest, he cultivates integrity. Where patriarchy feared emotion, he integrates it.

His word means something. His presence stabilizes rather than intimidates. His strength protects rather than diminishes.

He does not dominate life. He stands in service with it.

And the men who are doing this work, who are choosing presence over performance, stewardship over dominance, integrity over conquest, are not weak men. They are the most courageous thing the system never prepared for. A man who has healed is a man the patriarchy cannot manipulate.

When the divine feminine and the healed masculine meet, something becomes possible that patriarchy has always worked to prevent. Not merger. Not sameness. What emerges instead is sacred partnership. Two sovereign beings, each rooted in their own knowing, each bringing the fullness of what they are, building something together that neither could build alone.

Not hierarchy. Architecture.
Not dominance. Devotion.

And yet. Here we are. Still inside the system we are dismantling. Still navigating institutions that were not built for us, still absorbing a cultural atmosphere that has never been more hostile, still doing the internal work in the noisiest external moment most of us have ever lived through.

This is the part nobody talks about enough. The living inside the contradiction. The staying informed without being consumed. The feeling the rage fully without letting it detonate on the people closest to you. Resisting the pull toward shallow generalization and blame because you understand, even on the hardest days, that this is a system and systems are more complicated than villains.

It is not balance. Balance is a myth the system invented to keep women endlessly adjusting themselves. It is harmony. And harmony is not the absence of tension. It is the ability to hold tension without being destroyed by it.

It looks like this. It looks like reading the news and then closing the tab before it becomes your entire nervous system. It looks like feeling the grief of what is being lost and still showing up for your life with intention. It looks like questioning the belief you have held for twenty years because something in your body has always known it did not belong to you. It looks like catching the reflex, the shrinking, the reaching for permission, and choosing differently. Not perfectly. Differently.

The internal work does not pause because the external world is on fire. If anything, the external world on fire is the most clarifying argument for why the internal work cannot wait.

You are not going to dismantle the system today. You are not going to legislate your way out of centuries of conditioning before dinner. But you can do this. You can question one thing you were handed as truth. You can silence one patriarchal narrative that has been running in the background of your mind so long it sounds like your own voice. You can choose, just once more, to live by what is actually true for you instead of what was installed.

That is the work. Not the grand gesture. But the daily return.
The rage is information. The grief is acute. The knowing is yours.

Devotion, the real kind, the unglamorous, non-negotiable kind, is simply the decision to keep returning to yourself no matter what the world is doing around you.

That is the matriarchal life. Built from the inside out. One refused reaction at a time.