Calling the called

It’s collaboration time in The COVE

I am looking for collaborators. Women who want to write it with me, not for me to write about them. A Circle Of Voices Evolving.

I write about patriarchy like I know the whole thing.

I don't.

STORY: I know MY part of it. The part that came for my body and my recovery and my nervous system and my silence. The part that made me count calories in a church basement while someone handed me a chip for performing serenity correctly. That part I can write all day long because I lived every single word of it.

But patriarchy didn't come for all of us through the same door.

For Black women, Indigenous women, Brown women, for women who were navigating racial hierarchy AND gender hierarchy AND colonial violence AND a world that questioned whether their pain was even real, that is a completely different weight than what I carried. A heavier architecture. Built with more floors and fewer exits and a landlord who has never once been held accountable for any of it.

I can name that. I can point at it. I can absolutely refuse to pretend it doesn't exist.

What I cannot do is write it from the inside. Because I didn't live it from the inside. And pretending otherwise would make me exactly the kind of person I started this newsletter to call out.

So I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do something scarier. I'm going to ask for help.

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I am building a series on the full layers of patriarchy across the global majority and I need co-authors - not guest posters, not diversity content, not a brown face on my byline while I keep all the creative control.

I mean actual collaborators. Women who write their part and put their name on it and help shape the whole thing from the inside out.

Your name on your words. Every time. Full stop. No exceptions. No well actually I think you should frame it this way. No making your truth more digestible for my audience. No extraction dressed up as opportunity.

If your following is small, I don't care. If your Substack is brand new, I don't care. If you're still figuring out your voice, honestly that might make you more interesting not less.

What I care about is whether you have something true to say and whether you're done waiting for a room that feels safe enough to say it in.

Because I'm building that room right now and I saved you a seat.

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Reply here. Slide into my DMs. Find me in the Cove. Carrier pigeon if that's what you've got.

However you want to arrive, just arrive.

I'm listening for the thread of your story that makes your voice sing and I already know it's going to make this series something neither of us could pull off alone.

Come build it with me.

—Kim