On women, rooms, revolutions, and the parliament we were never invited to build.

Am I a witch? Perhaps, one who is asking to be burnt at the stake. Because some truths, I have learned, are worth the fire.

I grew up with three mothers. My mother. Her two sisters. A holy trinity of women who did not know they were my first philosophy, my first theology, my first education in what a woman could be if the world did not frighten her too much.

I idolised them the way children idolise before they learn cynicism. With the whole body. With the eyes wide open.

And something strange happened in all that watching, all that studying, all that quiet devotion to understanding what made them extraordinary. Not one drop of jealousy formed. Not one.

What grew instead was something rarer. Something the world does not have a clean word for. A desire not to compete with the women around me, but to contribute to them. To add to what they are building rather than subtract from it. To understand that another woman's brilliance is not a threat to mine. It is evidence that brilliance is possible. It is the proof I needed before I had the language to ask for it.

Every woman doing something similar to what I am doing is not my competition. She is my potential collaborator. This is the most intelligent position a woman who wants to build anything lasting can take in a world that has spent centuries trying to get us to devour each other before we think to look up and notice the architecture of who built the room we are fighting inside.

Women were taught to compete for the single seat at the table. The one allowed one. The one whose presence was tolerated as proof of progress while the table itself remained unchanged.

But collaboration. Real intellectual, creative, spiritual collaboration between women. That is something else entirely. That is a revolution. And they know it.

When women gather with intention, the world calls it a coven, a conspiracy, a cause for suspicion. When men do the same thing, the world calls it a parliament. Builds it a building. Gives it a coat of arms. So I thought. Fine. Let us build our own.

Join me in building this room which is not a support group or a networking event with wine and business cards and the careful performance of ambition made palatable.

This is THE parliament. A place where women come to think out loud about art. About culture. About spirituality and the ways it shapes the choices we make before we even realise we are making them. About politics, economics, science. About sociology and psychology and philosophy and the thousand ways these disciplines intersect with the particular experience of being a woman alive right now in this specific and extraordinary and terrifying moment in history.

Come have the conversations that do not require us to soften the edges of our intellect for anyone's comfort.

Come join the rooms where the full weight of a woman's mind is not just welcomed but required.

This is Girl Parliament. And it begins from the understanding that the world we want does not yet exist. Which means we are not waiting to be invited into it. We are building it. Ourselves. For ourselves. And eventually, from it, for everyone.

At the end, the world has been at war. Not metaphorically. The evidence is everywhere and most of us carry it in our bodies, in our news feeds, in the low-grade grief of watching what is happening and feeling the particular helplessness of the uninvited. But those wars are being run by a small number of people in a small number of rooms making decisions that affect every living thing on this planet.

And those rooms were built by people who were shaped, once, by the conversations happening in other rooms entirely.

Which means the rooms we build now matter. Which means the quality of thought happening inside them matters. Which means us. Now. Here.

Sometimes the room you need does not exist yet. Sometimes you walk the length and breadth of the world looking for the conversation that would change you, looking for the table that was built at the right height, looking for the space where you could be fully present and fully yourself and fully intellectual without anyone asking you to be less.

And then you realise. You have hands. You know how to build.