Dear Daughters—Don’t Let The High School Lunchroom Label Follow You

“Dear Daughters,

Can you hear the reckoning? It’s time. It’s time to become a generation of warriors.

Don’t let the high school lunchroom label follow you into adulthood because nice girl, mean girl, sleep-around girl are baseless and unimportant and you are going to shake the world, bring it to its knees, and I’m really not sorry here, but you just don’t have time for it.

Be good.

And not like ‘be good and mind your curfew and cross your legs and laugh in all the right places.’

I mean be THE good. Hold hands with the lonely. Walk with the lost. Stand next to the silenced. Feed the hungry. Be generous and gentle.

Don’t you dare forget how to stand and square your shoulders and bite back though, baby. Sink those teeth in. You are the result of your grandma and her grandma and even her grandma. Every single woman you have ever met courses through your veins and your marrow and use their voices as your rally cry when you have forgotten your own.

Create. You are the damn sun and you were born to do hard things and that means you are here to use your hands to create something. The cracks in your hands are not filled with mediocre. They are filled with extraordinary. Use those hands to hold up what you’ve created and show the world how good you are.

Find what you love. Chase it to the exclusion of all else. There will be days that you’ll need to stop and rest and that’s okay. Just don’t ever stop putting one foot in front of the other.

Women are powerful, holy beings. The hum of the strength vibrates under our skin. There will be days when your pure and graceful fire will terrify you. And there might be days, months, years even, that you find yourself lying dormant. And it will be then—the moment you rise—that you’ll realize the entire time you were only gathering strength for your roar.

For your battle cry.

My God, the world needs to hear it.

Don’t you dare ever forget it.”

This story was submitted to Love What Matters by Rebecca Cooper. You can follow her journey on Facebook. Submit your own story here and be sure sure to subscribe to our free email newsletter for our best stories, and YouTube for our best videos.

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