I have never been an easy woman to manage.

Even as a girl, I had the scent of disobedience on me. The kind that makes teachers tense, nuns nervous, and parents sigh heavily across the dinner table.

I didn’t know what to call it when I was younger. I just knew that certain expectations scraped my insides raw.

That agreeing when I didn’t mean it felt akin to swallowing sand.

If I sensed a command was about compliance and not integrity, I’d go limp inside. Or worse – I’d go rogue.

I got scolded in high school for turning in essays on orange typing paper. They said it wasn’t “legible” with white-out. I said the white-out should adapt.

I didn’t bother learning how to type properly because I knew, deep down, that I’d never spend my days sitting pretty behind a desk. So I wrote my first book in longhand, on lavender legal pads, with a ballpoint pen and a vengeance.

When I had to do chores I resented – like setting the table for meals – I’d grip each glass like a grudge and spit in someone’s water just to reclaim a shred of power.

Not all of my rebellion was noble. But all of it was mine.

You see, disobedience is its own kind of genius.

It’s how women survive the thousand invisible cuts of being told to behave. It’s how we protect the one wild part of us that’s still awake.

Sure, being difficult has a cost. People will call you dramatic. Unreasonable. Unlikable. But compliance does too. Every time a woman says yes when her body is screaming no, something vital leaks out.

She becomes easier to persuade.
Easier to override.
Easier to talk out of her instincts.

And eventually, she forgets what it felt like to stand on her own side.

Stubborn women don’t forget that feeling. They make plenty of mistakes – spectacular ones, sometimes – but they avoid the most corrosive error of all: abandoning themselves for approval.

Obstinance, at its most evolved, isn’t defiance. It’s fidelity. Fidelity to what you know. To what you feel. To what you refuse to betray again.

So today, I want to honor the women who are done negotiating their inner truth for external peace.

The so-called “difficult” women.

The ones who won’t say yes if their gut says no.
The ones who burn dinner before betraying themselves.
The ones who walk away from the deal, the date, the dream job if it means selling out their soul.

Women like that may not be easy. But they’ll never be empty.

So, as we inch towards a brand new year, this is my wish for you:

May you keep choosing yourself and your sacred refusal, even when it costs you something.

Especially then.

With so much love and pleasure,