🍵 Grab a cozy drink and take five — your attention span will thank you.
My version of the Crescent Moon Bear tale — It’s an old tale I read for our next reading club meeting.
Once upon a time, a sweet husband became a furious man after returning from the war. He was so hurt and traumatized that he slept in the forest, instead of hugging his lovely wife, who waited for him to come back home for many years.
Tired of being rejected and afraid of the enraged husband, she went to the witch’s hut and asked for a spell.
The witch says yes, but requires an unusual ingredient: Bring me a single white hair from the half-moon mark upon the neck of the wild bear that dwells atop the mountain.
As a good and in-love wife, she says, of course, and embraces the risk of getting killed by a dangerous creature.
She climbs the mountain, offers food to the bear, and convinces him to let her pluck one hair of the white half-moon on his neck.
Back in the hut, broken and exhausted, she gave the single hair to the witch.
After analyzing the hair, she attests it’s a true hair of the half-moon bear! Then she throws it into the fire!
I can’t trust my eyes! What have you done, crazy witch?
It’s okay, my dear. Now you’ve learned to conquer anger. Go to your husband, and all will be fine,
The Crescent Moon Bear is an old Japanese tale about healing the angry self. This story is full of archetypes and is supposed to be interpreted for a better understanding of anger. The husband is not necessarily another person; it can be our own rage, for example. Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine a situation in which a woman does all the heavy emotional work to save a relationship. And a beloved one.
Luckily, times are changing, and after the homework, instead of healing the hurt man, women had a better idea.
I’m still listening to Lily Allen’s new album and digesting her pain and brutal courage to expose what she went through. It’s so intimate that it feels wrong to listen, like reading someone’s diary and wishing you hadn’t because it’s too painful and shameful to acknowledge. The woman who told us to go ahead and smile fell into that trap.
It feels good to see shaming changing sides, though.
People are weird, indeed. But at least women are out here trying to heal our traumas and become better humans — whether by turning pain into art, trauma into hobbies, or tears into book clubs. Sisterhood has never been this strong in modern history. Long, long ago (like, 14th-century-long), women had real communities and actually helped each other — until someone decided it was more profitable to turn us into rivals. What a clever little system: keep women too busy fighting each other to notice who’s holding the leash.
They knew it was nearly impossible to tame us when we’re together. So after centuries of emotional damage, what did we do? We did our homework. We journaled. We booked a therapy session. We talked. We texted our group chats about it.
Meanwhile, maybe you know one or two men doing something similar, but that’s still about as rare as a bear with a half-moon mark on its neck.
Our collective healing isn’t just a trend — it’s here to stay, mostly because the results are instant. Have you noticed how rewarding it is to hype a woman up? She rises, helps the next one rise, and will probably have your back when it’s your turn to wobble. You don’t even have to become friends. There’s an unspoken sense of I got you, girl in the air.
In a world obsessed with policing our bodies and limiting our freedom to keep things comfortably unequal, healing is basically rebellion in disguise. I wish taking back agency over our bodies were boringly normal by now — but nope, it’s still a full-on revolution.
Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?
— I couldn’t control my excitement when I saw this question going viral in a Vogue Opinion piece!
We are so over it. We’re not climbing any mountains for any man. We’re done worshipping them, to the point we feel secondhand embarrassment (myötähäpeä, as the Finns wisely say) for women still showing theirs off.
I’m married to a man, and I still totally get the vibe.
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