I can only speak from my own experiences, and I think it’s time to speak about it.

I’m turning 50 in November. I’m an American woman who has never been married or pregnant. I have self sustained my entire adult life, and have lived and worked as a healthcare professional in four states. I’m an average person in the middle class workforce and I’ve been active in my community as a volunteer, entrepreneur, artist, writer and musician. I’m white. I’m straight. Because of my careers and lifestyle, I’ve been exposed to a large number of diverse people in the communities I’ve worked in and lived in.

If there’s anything I want to say to every person in my orbit, it is that life is not a competition. I pray that women will arrive at a time where we don’t compete, yet we nurture and support our world.

At some point, we have to be accountable. We have, I believe, blamed “society” for how it has pitted one female against another, and how “The Patriarchy” just wants to keep us down or keep us pumping out the babies. I’ve been on my own, and yes, misogyny is real, sexism is real, discrimination is real, sexual harassment is real – I’ve been there, and I’ve directly witnessed that both men and women do it and largely get away with it.

There are so many issues, and so much drama, there is no way to get to the core of any one social issue to find solutions. And the adults appear as if we are focusing on the issues the media focuses on, and we are not really focusing on the relationships in front of us that set the examples to the people and the community around us.

I can only speak from my own experiences, and because I’ve been single most of my adult life, I was able to do things like be in performing bands, have my own local magazine for a short while, try to start a nonprofit in my profession, and it took a lot of networking – my experiences speak loudly to me. What I have witnessed from women isn’t something women really want to hear.

There aren’t many of us that like to be called out, and that could be our biggest detriment.

When I was 29, I looked like I was 19 and I was pretty, with a nice little body. I was always a “Tom boy” and I hung out with other girls who wore jeans and teeshirts and liked to hike and camp. Our group went camping one summer down in the canyons near Strawberry, Arizona. The campground was hidden, we took a long dirt road that wound down around beautiful cliffs where the rock was just starting to turn red. The campground itself had its own river and small waterfalls to enjoy.

It was beautiful and there were these characters that actually sort of lived in this campground, they were transients. Of course, we young women were a main attraction, like freshman at college. And we’d made friends with some of the “locals” there, one was a gentleman named Scott, and he was in his early 50s. He showed us around and I have to say, he really was respectful and didn’t hit on us.

We returned to this campground several times that summer when we could camp, and one of the times Scott had “girlfriend” from the city. She was maybe a few years older than him and she was just so excited to have found this jungle man who lived free, and she seemed to be enjoying the romance. We’ll call her Betty, because I don’t remember her name. Betty took an instant disliking to me.

It was later in the afternoon that Betty approached me, we’d all gone swimming and she had cornered me one-on-one to tell me that she noticed I was flirting with Scott and she thought I liked him. That threw me off. I had guys my own age on my mind, and I told her that Scott was too old and not at all my type and that I had a crush on a guy in the town where I lived. That was the truth. It didn’t matter to Betty.

Later that night, my group of friends and some neighboring campers had a campfire and we were sitting around laughing and telling stories. We could hear a little arguing from Scott’s camp and I could hear Betty say, “You were looking at her tits!” A while later, Betty walked over to our campfire to inform me that I ruined her relationship.

I sat there in awkward silence and said, “I ruined your relationship just by sitting over here at this campfire.” I can’t remember her response, but what I will always remember is that none of my friends, or the neighbors joining us, said a word. No one stuck up for me. It would have been so easy for someone to say, “Hey lady, she’s just sitting here having a good time. You’re not welcome to come over here and bully her. Please leave.” No one in the group was strong enough to stand up to the bully.

I could write many chapters of many books about experiences where injustices took place right in front of the eyes of many witnesses and no one said a word. After the #metoo movement, the word of the year was “complicit”. Yes, we are. Women are responsible for the fact that when we could have spoken out, so many times – we did not. But there’s something beyond our silence that is our core problem, because it prevents our unity.

We can probably understand that if we were harassed and spoke out, we could be blackballed from our chosen profession and we would have to start over. I’ve spoken out, and yes, I was made to feel very uncomfortable in the pharmacy profession for doing so. My colleagues saw the same lack of integrity and ethics in the corporate culture and remained silent. Discrimination and cut throat corporate culture are very real in today’s workforce.

Many of us purchased our careers from Universities and many still owe back the money on student loans. Many can’t afford to purchase another career as tuition high skyrocketed. So yes, there’s something to be said about taking abuse for the sake of survival.

It’s time to start a conversation about the issues within female culture that are not understandable, because they are blatantly harmful.

Female on female abuse is rampant and normalized in our American culture. It’s so normalized we fail to see it as actual “abuse”.

The gossip, the lies, the jealousy, the need to see each other as a threat is something that is sewn throughout the fabric of our society and it’s really something that starts in grade school, for the most part. Bullying leads to young people committing suicide, and for as protective as mothers naturally are, I’m not seeing us striving for cultural change through having this conversation with our daughters, our nieces or even our friend circles.

With boys, we mostly see fist fights when there is betrayal or the need to establish who is the alpha of the turf. Bullying, verbal abuse and fighting is more out front with males. It’s also easier for young men to respect one another after the fight and go hang out together. There are definitely issues in male culture as well, where things like lying and corruption are no longer “wrong” in our broader viewpoint of our nation’s reputation and overall impression on the rest of the world.

Everyone is responsible for the return of integrity and morals into our systems.

The discord and confusion the United States is facing isn’t because of one gender or the other, one race or the other, one issue or the other – we all need to change. Additionally, women have yet to exert their full empowerment in our American society, and there’s no reason in our modern day that we should continue to demure to a Patriarchy that only exists in our minds, because we agree to it.

We have to change if we want things to change.

WE have to change if we want things to change. We have to put our finger on what exactly we want to see change for the benefit of every single living being. That starts in our hearts. Our hearts must change first. That is where the strength of humanity is and women are naturally mothers, whether we have been pregnant or not. Our biology is set up that way. It’s time we used that power to transform the planet.

I’ve mentored young women and I’ve been mentored. I’ve known some very solid women who always support other females no matter what. I can tell you their names. They are women that I respect and who influenced me in the best possible ways. And at the end of my life, during my life review, these women will be pillars in the building of my own character, and thus, my life story. Some of them will never know how much I truly valued and appreciated their character and what a positive difference it made for me at times when others treated me like a punching bag.

I don’t know if I will remember the people who intentionally tried to harm me with gossip, verbal abuse, slander, emotional abuse and financial abuse. What I do know, and what makes me write this article to begin with, is that the pillars are by far more powerful and more inspiring, but they are also few and far between the women who refuse to support one another and who have seen their own life story as a competition. I wholeheartedly believe we need more pillars.

I wholeheartedly believe that all people want the same thing – love, security, and the best quality of life possible, which means good health and the freedom to move about the planet, learning and adventuring, while experiencing personal growth and development throughout the journey of life. We’ve come to a place in our culture where we feel that we must compete for these things and prove that we have them, so that we feel “successful.”

If women are the nurturers and they are also naturally caretakers and hard workers, there’s no reason we shouldn’t harness the healing potential and the creative potential found in our core selves to lead our families, our inner circles and our local communities in a way that shows strength through unity and cooperation. It can feel like things have always been “this way” and nothing we can do will really make a difference. We can make a difference.

We can make a difference by being the change. Sure – it sounds so cliche. It probably deserves an eye roll. And if we don’t do it, things stay the same. The only way to see change is to be change.

The way to change is to be accountable and to do it differently from now on.

Every day is a new day to make the right choices. Every moment is an instance where we choose whether or not we will support or we will compete, whether we will help, ignore or harm, whether we speak the truth or we don’t. Our choices lead to results, and good choices lead to good results.

Our only chance for real change is to be accountable for our own part in the mess.

In my work, I hear a lot of times that people don’t know how to say they are sorry. With couples, there are many times one spouse has been hurt by something that was said, and they can’t let it go. A decade or more can pass and that hurt remains. It causes distance in the relationship that doesn’t need to be there, because relationships thrive on friendship and closeness. Yet, if both hearts would open to see that neither meant harm, if both are accountable for not being perfect, closeness can be there despite the past hurts.

In our culture, one that likes competition, we haven’t largely pressed the issue of accountability. We can see this in the healthcare epidemic of diabetes and obesity in our country. We can see this in the number of mass shootings that occur in our country. We can see that so many are upset about the way things are, and we can see so many fingers pointing at one another.

Both women and men can benefit the entire collective by being accountable for how they may contribute daily to our cultural shortcomings. In a world of opposites, yes, there will be lovers and haters. It’s up to us as individuals to be one or the other. Generally, haters do not read blogs like this.

For those that want to see a better world, we also need to see where we have acted out of a competitive vibe, maybe we did say something about another woman we really regret saying. Perhaps we did misrepresent ourselves by acting too quickly, overstepping boundaries we shouldn’t have, or thinking we would be supported more than we are. Every day is a new day. We don’t have to live from the past. We have to make a new choice today for the future.

There are practical, simple ways to change.

When we catch ourselves actually being unhappy that another woman is having success we need to self-regulate. Stop the thought when we see it passing into our mind, and remind ourselves that jealousy and envy are not virtues that benefit us or anyone else. Once we have had negative thoughts about the other, and we catch ourselves, we can then stop the negative thought and consciously send love, light and a blessing to the other person.

We are energetically communicating with each other all the time. Females know about nuanced communication as well. We can see a hidden agenda coming from miles away. We will even engage with the person with that agenda and pretend that we don’t know they have the agenda. We can read each others manipulativeness. For some, this is so automatic it may feel very weird to have read that, and you might resist the statement. Yet, as a woman, there’s an intuitive sense within that lets us know what is a threat and what is just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

Many mothers can intuitively tell what is going on with their children without conversation, without being in the same room, and in some cases, without being in the same state. Collectively, we must honor that our biology and inner workings are sensitive and nurturing. We are connected to one another through this innate compassion and empathy. Every person, ourselves and other women included, should be treated as if they are our child. We should be coming together under common cause to nurture our communities, to cooperate, to support and to build a beautiful society where we respect one another.

Our accountability stems directly from our ability to have respect for ourselves. I can remember when I was in high school two of the mothers in our small town publicly yelling at each other, driving by each other’s house to badger, and basically acting like two schoolyard bullies. I don’t know if either looked back years later and regretted how bad they made themselves look and what a horrible example they set for all of us daughters to see. I can see now, the problem is that neither had any respect for themselves at that time in their lives and thus, could never really respect another.

Respect for self doesn’t mean cowering to a bully. A more reasonable woman, or a group of more reasonable women, should have called out the two mothers in the above example. Teachers and coaches who were bullies to school kids should have been called out by the adults who had respect for themselves and the students. Out of respect for the collective, we certainly should set a better example, and sometimes that means having the difficult conversation with another woman.

The difficult conversation is the one where we acknowledge that this competitive undercurrent exists and we agree that yes, sometimes we might envy, sometimes we may covet what another woman has, sometimes we may desire to have her essence of confidence or the platform she has. Having human feelings is ok, we can acknowledge it and then make a conscious choice to honor, value and support her, even if silently. The conversation is us encouraging one another to do this.

The conversation is the accountability. We shy away from the uncomfortable realities of petty human behavior brought out by a competitive American culture. In the Capitalist and corporatized societal systems, we thrive, or the media makes it appear as such, by having healthy market competition. We can have all the same systems we have now, and integrate respect and support for one another into the new fabric and patchwork of our nation. We have holes that need patched and stitched up with new thread.

Women can start to sew our true offerings into this fabric by setting the example. Instead of it being just a few rare pillars in the life of a woman my age, we can build a world where by the time a woman is 50 she’s used to seeing women support and nurture, respect and care for every person around them. A new normal would be a caring and compassionate culture, where we all thrive because all are equally supported and nurtured. She would be used to seeing empowered women and female leaders. She’d be unfamiliar with gossip and the concept of undermining another woman.

The new normal can be that women step forward into the loving, heart-centered example that all are meant to be. Each one of us is meant to shine and walk in our true light. That empowerment is found in our self esteem and in our heart center. At the core of us all is the urge to love and to be loved. This is what drives families and procreation, and unity within communities. All the world is a child. Not everyone is a parent, but everyone here and alive today is a child of someone. There’s always an opportunity to nurture and support a child.

I hope that we can begin to see that every child on this planet deserves to be nurtured and cared for. I hope we can see ourselves and one another as such. Change is the only constant and a new trend can gain momentum for a better future. It’s up to us to change first.