We are the women who were taught that friendship between women would always come with rivalry, jealousy and division. We chose differently. We made a circle.
We do not shrink to make a room comfortable. We do not hand another woman's secret to a crowd. We do not confuse agreement with loyalty. We say the hard things to her face and stay gentle enough to receive the answer.
We know jealousy can enter the room. So can anger. So can grief. None of them gets to decide who we become to one another.
Because we are sisters. Not bonded by blood, but by choice, trust, and the lives we have carried beside one another.
We speak each other's names in rooms where doors are opening. We open doors and do not let them swing shut behind us. We share openly. We cry without making ourselves smaller for it. We laugh uncontrollably. We bring food. We make the call.
We know that love is sometimes tenderness, and sometimes looking the woman beside you straight in the eyes and saying: “This is not all of you. Remember who you are.”
We do not worship sacrifice. We do not call exhaustion devotion. We do not ask women to disappear in order to belong.
We are sisters. We honour the women who came before us without repeating every wound they handed down. We stay when the truth becomes uncomfortable. We tell the truth about our bodies, our age, our rage, our hunger, our mistakes. We make room for the woman who changed her mind. For the woman starting again. For the woman who has nothing left to prove.
We know our lives are not equal. Money matters. Skin matters. Country matters. Health matters. Luck matters. So we look around the circle and notice who is missing. We do not need to be the same to stand beside one another. We do not need to be easy to be loved.
Governments forget. Institutions forget. History edits. Kitchens remember. Women remember.
And when one of us loses the thread, another places it back in her hand.
This is Sisterhood. Not perfection. Practice. Commitment. Devotion. Not performance.
We are real. We are SISTERHOOD.
Photo: Bibi Friman