Queen Takes A Pot – Epilogue – Stopped Stepping Aside

I want to tell you something about the way women compete.

It doesn’t look like competition. That’s the first thing. It looks like friendship –  the arm around the shoulder, the shared laugh, the oh my god you have to meet my best friend said to someone who was already interested in you before your best friend arrived. It looks like warmth. It looks like the natural social ease of two women who have known each other long enough to move through rooms as a unit.

It is competition.

It has always been competition.

I just didn’t have a word for it for a very long time. Or I had words –  I had Tasha being Tasha, I had she doesn’t even realize she does it, I had it’s fine, he wasn’t that interesting anyway –  but those words were performing a function that had nothing to do with accuracy. They were the words of a woman who had decided, somewhere along the way, that naming what was happening would require her to do something about it.

And she didn’t know what to do about it yet.

I’m sitting somewhere quiet as I write this. Tasha is not here. She has not been here in a while, which is its own kind of resolution, the quiet kind that doesn’t announce itself. We did not have a confrontation. We did not have the dramatic, clear-the-air conversation that part of me spent years imagining. What we had was a gradual, mutual recognition that the friendship had been running on a particular fuel and the fuel had changed, and without it the engine simply stopped.

I am not sad about this.

That surprised me, when I noticed it. I expected to be sad. Seven years of friendship deserves some grief when it ends, or at least some wistfulness, some sense of loss. What I felt instead was the specific, uncomplicated relief of a person who has been holding something heavy for a long time and has finally set it down.

This is a story about a woman who learned, very late, that she was allowed to want things.

Specific things. The man across the room who was looking at her, not at her louder, more available friend. The moment of connection that was hers before anyone else arrived to claim it. The simple, unremarkable experience of being chosen and choosing back without immediately constructing an exit for the other person to use.

This is also a story about the moment a passive person becomes active.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Not through confrontation or revenge or any of the theatrical mechanisms by which transformation is usually depicted.

Just – a decision.

The decision to stop stepping aside.

I will tell you now, before you read any of it, that the decision was smaller than you might expect. It did not feel like a turning point while it was happening. It felt like a Tuesday evening in a bar where I simply did not move when I usually would have moved, and everything followed from that.

But everything did follow from that.

My name is Ann.

And I used to give things away before anyone could take them.

This is the story of how I stopped.