More about awesome women

I read through all of the awesome women proclaiming their awesomeness thread yesterday (having previously only looked at a couple pages of it), and I got all misty-eyed all over again.

I loved the variety of ways in which the women who posted are awesome: writing, gardening, parenting, toad-adoption, millipede-saving, walking across Spain, doing scary things, helping people, cooking, editing, librarianing, teaching, making music and art, being a godmother, learning, founding organizations and publications, exercising, surviving and continuing on despite various forms and degrees of adversity, web designing, engineering, weightlifting, academicking, relaxing, being the Cool Adult in a child's life, being a good friend and/or sister, knitting, and many more.

And I loved the support and praise for each entry from others in the thread—though I'm sad that the supportive comments seem to have fallen off somewhat in the past day or so. (But new people are still adding posts, so keep stopping by. There are nearly 400 comments on that thread now.)

And I particularly loved the bravery of the women who were scared to post but did it anyway.

And I was especially happy that friends of mine posted there. I know it isn't about me at all, but just speaking for my own personal pleasure, seeing my awesome friends post was even better than the awesomeness of seeing the other people posting.

Karen H has now posted a followup entry: The Awesome Movement and the Dreaded Even Thoughs. In which she discusses other places where women are being (and being encouraged to be) unapologetically awesome, and in which she talks about what sparked her original entry, and in which she describes how hard it was to post about her own considerable awesomeness without qualifying and apologizing and self-deprecating.

She adds:

I know I was not alone in hesitating, in having to fight very hard against those qualifications, the dreaded "even thoughs" of "I am great BUT NOT THAT GREAT please don't think I am bragging I am sure most other people in the world are way greater than me please don't hate me for being such a boastful wench." I know several people had trouble posting on that thread, because they said so—and then they did it anyway, because they are AWESOME.

[...]

There is basically no chance that I will ever forget that I am not perfect, that I do many things badly, that I have made terrible decisions and failed at many goals. I don't need to practice humility; downplaying my achievements is my default state.

Go read the entry for more. Also, in the comments on that followup entry, there are a few more women declaring their awesomeness. Good stuff.

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