This is Why I Love This Thing

I stumbled upon Twyla while reading Peg's blog and I remember thinking "Wow, this is someone so unlike me, but from whom I could learn a lot about patience and understanding and healing." It's really amazing, when you think about it, that total strangers unveil themselves for other total strangers to read, laugh at, dismiss, or be deeply moved by. This morning, over Fruit Loops, I was reading Summer's latest entry and I felt that same way--like I was very lucky to have stumbled across this writer. I don't think Twyla and Summer have a lot in common as writers. I'm not even sure if they'd like each other's style of writing. But reading something like this--

I knew I was, as someone who had long called herself a feminist, supposed to feel like a subject. Like a valuable woman deserving of equal rights and equal pay and equal say. Like a woman who both knows her own worth and believes in it. Empowered. Yes, I knew--had even memorized--the schpiel, I had just failed to internalize it all. Sure, I had gotten the right things into my head, into my philosophy, into my worldview...just not into my selfview. No, though I wanted—desperately wanted—to feel it all down in my guts, the rhetoric had never made it quite that far.

--which feels like a kind of truth I immediately recognize but don't know how to articulate for myself made me want to draw Twyla's attention to Summer and Summer's attention to Twyla. So, there it is. You may read each other and say "Wow, I have no idea why Aunt B. thought I'd like this," but I hope you read each other and appreciate in each other what I appreciate, that brave openness to beauty and self-discovery.