This week, we get intimate with San Francisco-based member Abigail. She shares how her early home life and professional work with vulnerable women led to her finding a nurturing home in Skirt Club.
Abigail is now a Skirt Club supporter and parties regularly at events curated by San Francisco event director Topanga Turk. She reveals how Skirt Club helped her get over a relationship, expand her sexual and relationship boundaries and to give her the confidence to empower and champion women in other areas of her life.
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Skirt Club Diaries: Chapter 9
by
Abigail, San Francisco
I have gone through life having to deny myself many things. Whether it’s so to protect or provide for many. It’s not until recently in my thirties that I have found more of myself and a few opportunities to live authentically. My childhood, teens, and twenties were more about surviving.
I experienced abuse by trusted adults and also had to grow up compensating for unstable caretakers in my life. But in my thirties, I found healing and honor within myself. I sought therapies to correct oppressive belief systems that blocked me from seeing who I am. In that journey, one of the many things I discovered was my attraction to women.
Skirt Club had come onto my radar at the end of a relationship with a woman. Attending my first Skirt event in 2017 helped cope with the heartbreak. But I discovered that there was more to gain being part of Skirt Club. My daily work includes rallying behind vulnerable women as a health professional. I provide women with dignity where there may be little and opportunities for better health outcomes.
I also take the chance to energize these women as powerful individuals rather than just givers to men.
Empowering women is so important because in western society, we don’t know of a time when women were ever natural powerful figures like those in more ancient cultures. There’s more evolving to do. I can only hope I bring forward a meaningful ripple effect.
I think gifted women should know their strengths and to understand their unique life experiences so they can share this to all in need whether that happens to be women, men, or children. As for me, my strengths are that I am brave, intelligent, and inclusive and I’m using what’s shaped me to close the gap of health outcome disparities between men and women.
I hope that I am playing a role in affecting change among ethnic groups within the S.F. Bay Area that continue to place their women as subservient. I’ve made some career moves affording me trust-worthiness and inclusion to some powerful committees. The Tuesday after the last Skirt event in San Francisco, I was invited to a council meeting and made significant influences on decisions about the women we serve.
Unfortunately, there is a stigma at my workplace about women who are attracted to women. Heteronormative lifestyles are essentially what’s 'status quo' there. While health equality for the LGBTQIA patient is slowly gaining attention in the medical field, there is no open acceptance of the bisexual/fluid woman working with cis female individuals.
I do not feel comfortable coming out at work anytime in the near future. And this often saddens me. In the meantime, the Skirt Club network affords me the chance to meet other health professionals who share my same exact secret. Knowing more women who understand my situation saves me from the isolation and depression that closeted individuals often suffer.
It’s important for me to have a space or at least have a moment in time where I can allow myself as a sexual woman to be attracted to other women within the privacy of the club. It’s reassuring that there are others like me subscribed to the discretion the club offers.
Skirt Club has changed my life by giving me permission to be more of what I am. With however unaccepting my real life is, I can continue pursuing the journey to myself.
My guess is that in the future, Skirt may evolve to other purposeful empowering endeavors as it grows. The way Studio 54 started with legendary parties and eventually revitalized an entire neighborhood in New York.
Skirt is essential in San Francisco in that femme bisexual/fluid women have always had significantly fewer social spaces than that of gay men. With Skirt events, identities of women like me are made to matter.
Skirt is serving a good purpose and will continue to have one. Whenever there are people that broker freedom from religious to sexual, they always deserve good karma...and Skirt Club deserves the best karma.
***
Skirt Club member? Connect with Abigail via Skirt Club’s San Francisco community > @christineroams17
Abigail is now a Skirt Club supporter and parties regularly at events curated by San Francisco event director Topanga Turk. She reveals how Skirt Club helped her get over a relationship, expand her sexual and relationship boundaries and to give her the confidence to empower and champion women in other areas of her life.
***
Skirt Club Diaries: Chapter 9
by
Abigail, San Francisco
I have gone through life having to deny myself many things. Whether it’s so to protect or provide for many. It’s not until recently in my thirties that I have found more of myself and a few opportunities to live authentically. My childhood, teens, and twenties were more about surviving.
I experienced abuse by trusted adults and also had to grow up compensating for unstable caretakers in my life. But in my thirties, I found healing and honor within myself. I sought therapies to correct oppressive belief systems that blocked me from seeing who I am. In that journey, one of the many things I discovered was my attraction to women.
Skirt Club had come onto my radar at the end of a relationship with a woman. Attending my first Skirt event in 2017 helped cope with the heartbreak. But I discovered that there was more to gain being part of Skirt Club. My daily work includes rallying behind vulnerable women as a health professional. I provide women with dignity where there may be little and opportunities for better health outcomes.
I also take the chance to energize these women as powerful individuals rather than just givers to men.
Empowering women is so important because in western society, we don’t know of a time when women were ever natural powerful figures like those in more ancient cultures. There’s more evolving to do. I can only hope I bring forward a meaningful ripple effect.
I think gifted women should know their strengths and to understand their unique life experiences so they can share this to all in need whether that happens to be women, men, or children. As for me, my strengths are that I am brave, intelligent, and inclusive and I’m using what’s shaped me to close the gap of health outcome disparities between men and women.
I hope that I am playing a role in affecting change among ethnic groups within the S.F. Bay Area that continue to place their women as subservient. I’ve made some career moves affording me trust-worthiness and inclusion to some powerful committees. The Tuesday after the last Skirt event in San Francisco, I was invited to a council meeting and made significant influences on decisions about the women we serve.
Unfortunately, there is a stigma at my workplace about women who are attracted to women. Heteronormative lifestyles are essentially what’s 'status quo' there. While health equality for the LGBTQIA patient is slowly gaining attention in the medical field, there is no open acceptance of the bisexual/fluid woman working with cis female individuals.
I do not feel comfortable coming out at work anytime in the near future. And this often saddens me. In the meantime, the Skirt Club network affords me the chance to meet other health professionals who share my same exact secret. Knowing more women who understand my situation saves me from the isolation and depression that closeted individuals often suffer.
It’s important for me to have a space or at least have a moment in time where I can allow myself as a sexual woman to be attracted to other women within the privacy of the club. It’s reassuring that there are others like me subscribed to the discretion the club offers.
Skirt Club has changed my life by giving me permission to be more of what I am. With however unaccepting my real life is, I can continue pursuing the journey to myself.
My guess is that in the future, Skirt may evolve to other purposeful empowering endeavors as it grows. The way Studio 54 started with legendary parties and eventually revitalized an entire neighborhood in New York.
Skirt is essential in San Francisco in that femme bisexual/fluid women have always had significantly fewer social spaces than that of gay men. With Skirt events, identities of women like me are made to matter.
Skirt is serving a good purpose and will continue to have one. Whenever there are people that broker freedom from religious to sexual, they always deserve good karma...and Skirt Club deserves the best karma.
***
Skirt Club member? Connect with Abigail via Skirt Club’s San Francisco community > @christineroams17