Project!

(I sent this out as an email today so it might be a repeat for some of you. But I have a lot of blogosphere friends I wanted to include in this project)

Last year I was wandering around an Anthropologie in Georgetown and happened upon a little book called "Letters to My Younger Self." It was a book of 41 letters written by all kinds of famous women to a younger version of themselves at a particularly crucial moment in their history. They wrote advice about starting starting careers, dealing with heartbreak, the way to treat people, thing not to worry about....I was so struck by the honesty and the really great advice that I went right back to my hotel and pounded out my own letter to sixteen year old Katie. It was a really fun thing to do and quite satisfying to think that I might have actually learned a thing or two as I have gotten older. I go back and read that letter a lot, and I hope that if I ever have a sixteen year old daughter, maybe some of what I wrote there will be meaningful or helpful to her.

The more life experience I have, the more I feel that as women, we have a tendency to hold ourselves to some fairly ridiculous standards. We compare our worst selves to someone else's very best, we worry that we aren't good enough/smart enough/hot enough/accomplished enough. We minimize our good qualities and blow up the ones we are struggling with. But the wonderful thing is that when we open up and have the courage to be honest with each other about our fears and insecurities, we find that not only do other people feel the same way we do, the very act of encouraging each other usually pulls us right out of our own funk.

So I was thinking, famous women are all well and good but hey, I've collected a pretty fine group of female friends over the years myself. It would be fantastic to get all of THEM to write letters like this, throw them on a blog, and then use one of those handy dandy blog slurping programs to create a book of my very own so I can be inspired and uplifted any old time I want.

Enter you. If you are getting this email it means you are part of my "fabulous women" web and I'd like to invite you to participate in my little project. And I'd like to ask you to invite important women in your own life as well. So send this off to your friends/sisters/grandmothers/running buddies...I would love to collect as many as possible from women of all ages and backgrounds.

That's my pitch, if you are interested in being a part of this super fun project that will require little effort and yield a wonderful return, leave me a comment and I'll be in touch with more details. In the meantime, here is my own little letter. Ah 16, you were so funny.