They were just two little words – a pronoun and an adverb. But in November 2016, they rose up like the Phoenix out of its ashes, and shone a light on millions of women around the world who understood that, at this frontier, we could, by simply uttering MeToo, upend the social and political paradigms that had been established to crush female ambition.

At the time, I was writing my first novel, Sisterly Love, a story about two sisters who grow apart. But by December, global female rage at sustained patriarchal abuse had gained unprecedented momentum. Women were angry, and so, I realized, was I. In the wake of this unexpected opportunity, I abandoned my fears and seized the courage to tell the story in my heart: a brutally honest exploration of the capacity of institutions, like family, religion and politics, to conspire against women who want power.

I was crafting my work from my student digs, at Columbia University in New York; an apartment block on Broadway that I shared with other female careerists from around the world. From time to time we drank wine and exchanged stories of girlhood experiences that were intended to shape us: gentle rebukes – when we enthusiastically announced, to our families, plans to become economists, scientists, jurors, CEOs, novelists – followed by well-meaning descriptions of the lives that were available to us.

Some of us spoke of a moment when we had sensed the trap and silently, stealthily worked a way out. We never thought about the consequences of following our dreams, but we each believed that if we worked hard enough, we would, one day, be accepted––the idea of isolation was intolerable.

Becoming a novelist had appealed to me from an early age. I loved transferring the ideas in my head to words on the page, and the way my characters exploded to life in worlds I created. I was fascinated with point-of-view, I liked experimenting with time, but it was the power to make my readers think differently that absorbed me most. During those years, I privately labored at my craft, I came to understand that if I was to write stories that people wanted to read, I would need to acquire a much more sophisticated set of literary tools and learn how to deploy them for a greater cause.

But the path to my dream would be long and harried. Writing novels is not a career, I was told. So, I became a journalist, then a speechwriter and finally, in my late thirties, I found myself in a position to be able to set, in concrete, plans to bring to life, my willful desire to write fiction.

I calculated that getting from Australia to New York would require discipline, determination and patience. I canvassed opinion from those close to me. I was congratulated for my boldness, and yet I sensed a dark consensus; no one said it outright but the inference was that I was too old to be chasing rainbows. I should, instead, be setting aside my overachieving tendencies and selfish desires in favor of helping the younger generations get ahead––that’s what older women do, right?

But in the new world order, characterized by fear of globalization, aggressive nationalism and a growing cohort of powerful women who will not be told they can’t, the concept of over-achieving has no place. The women I work with today, in the New York office of a global human resources firm, where I am a writer, openly reject the hostile competition that Naomi Wolf identified as the beauty myth.

Recently, as I have looked to the future, I have rediscovered the confidence I lost somewhere in my childhood; my new ally is the freedom to be myself. And as I step up to the challenges ahead and join forces with women who, like me, are hell-bent on making the world a fairer place, I am accompanied by two other little words whose time, I believe, has come: carpe diem!

Author Profile

D.L Lee is a journalist and fiction writer. An Australian by birth, she currently lives and works in New York City. She is a graduate of Columbia University.