Notes from the desk of a woman

Recently, someone commented something along the lines of “I thought you weren’t supposed to have a political stance” on one of my videos (if you guessed it was on my NRA video you are correct). They were confused, thinking I was still working for the mostly apolitical Morning Brew. I clarified my status as an independent creator with a very clear progressive attitude, and in doing so thought back on the political shape my content has taken over the last year as I’ve matured, grown, and seen more of the world.

When I started Thinking Is Cool, I was never interested in feigning objectivity. I believe fundamentally in certain ideas that are typically codified as leftist. That’s part of who I am, and it inevitably seeps into the content I create. I think you know that, but still I try my best to make it clear when something I’m suggesting is opinion, especially a political one, instead of reported fact.

As you read the jumbled, heartbroken, confused words below, know this—they are not political. They are how I feel, raw and real and honest and opinionated. But this is not a political issue. This is a human one, and I hope you’ll read with that in mind.

Notes from the desk of a woman on June 24, 2022

I walked into a midmorning barre class that looked out over a buzzing West Village preparing for this weekend’s Pride Parade and I was beaming, offered by the summer sky a feeling of wholeness and a tangible sense of optimism and joy.

When I walked out an hour later, I had been stripped of a constitutional right. How could something so monumental have felt so unceremonious? When did the decision come down—was it while I was holding a plank, or while I was meditating on my goals during breath work, or maybe, in a fitting irony, it was while I was watching myself in the mirror as I moved, finally feeling comfortable in my own body after so many years of fighting with it.

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade didn’t come as a surprise, but it still knocked the breath out of me as I stood on 6th Avenue reading the push alerts I’d missed. I spent the next hour in a fugue state, ambling through crowds who all seemed to be doing the same thing…wondering what we’re supposed to do now.

Many brilliant writers and thinkers have profiled in painstaking detail how we got here, so I’ll refrain from rehashing the perpetration of so many wounds. Instead, I find myself thinking at this moment about fear, and what path that fear might illuminate for me.

As I regained my bearings walking home earlier today, I thought to myself: What are they so afraid of? Because there’s no way this decision was rooted in anything other than fear—fear of losing power and control, fear of equality, fear of progress. I mean, quite literally, support for abortion is at an all-time high in America, a country where it’s highly unlikely 57% of people agree on anything. And yet in the case of abortion, more than two-thirds of Americans are in favor of upholding Roe and 57% say they affirm women’s rights to abortion for any reason.

So it must be fear.

Is it really so scary to architect a country that doesn’t allow itself to be governed by what we think a group of long-dead white men who made the rules 300 years ago might say? Is it really so scary to allow women the same opportunities afforded to men—to exercise autonomy over their bodies, to make decisions that work for their lives, to have choice at all? Is it really so scary to take a stand?

It must be, at least for the justices who supported the court’s majority opinion on Roe today. I see photos of those justices floating around Instagram, and all I see is fear. I would pity them if they hadn’t just set my rights ablaze. Fear is a powerful force, and it clearly exacted a troubling mindset on them.

I spent this afternoon vacillating between attitudes of “I refuse to live in a country that so clearly doesn’t want me to maintain real, true personhood under the law” and “I must fight, if not for myself, for the women who can’t uproot their lives and escape to another country more welcoming to our sex.”

The latter. I choose the latter. I choose to fight. Because giving up, jumping ship, running…that’s what they want. That’s what feeds their sick obsession with pretending authoritarian control is the moral or constitutional high ground. The forces behind the decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade want us scared. They want us dejected. They want us to stop fighting.

I refuse to give them what they want. I will fight, using all the tools at my disposal, for as long as I have fingers to type with, a voice to speak with, a vote to cast, and a check to write.

I refuse to be scared.

I’m a white woman living in New York, qualifying me as one of the lucky few who will still be able to access abortion healthcare should I need or want it. It’s not my position to be fearful—it’s my position to fight, tooth and nail.

So that my fellow women marooned in the 26 backwards states banning and restricting abortion might hope for a future in which they too have basic constitutional rights. So that my fellow women wrestling each day with the grips of poverty might someday be again granted access to decide on parenthood for themselves. So that my fellow women who are marginalized based on race might imagine a world in which their hard-fought autonomy is restored.

I fight for all of you. And I refuse to give up.

I wrote those words tearfully, and admittedly somewhat selfishly—they helped me cope with emotions that felt bigger than I was capable of handling on my own, at least not immediately. But as I recalibrate and begin to formulate my plan for fighting, I’ve come across some resources worth sharing. Here you go:

Good (okay not good because this f*cking sucks but informative nonetheless) Tweets™

And one more from GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis that for some reason won't format right when I try to embed it but is nonetheless worth reading.

Even More Reading:

• NPR with a detailed account of pretty much everything + what it all means

• Jia Tolentino for the New Yorker: “We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse”

• FiveThirtyEight explains what the majority opinion communicated and its consequences

How I will spend the rest of my afternoon:

Thanking my lucky stars that my Mirena IUD is good for another two years and scheduling an appointment to get a replacement as soon as I can;

Donating to abortion funds (find some ideas for where to donate if you’re able here), especially in my home state of Florida where everything is awful all of the time;

And making sure every single one of my friends knows that we are in an election year and the only surefire way to upend the status quo (aside from instituting ranked choice voting and ending gerrymandering but that’s a newsletter for another time) is to cast a ballot. You can check your registration status here.

To the fight ahead,

Kinsey