Hello Eli. Lovely to meet you and thank you for the follow. Of course I have reciprocated and I look forward to us reading each other’s work. And I especially look forward to getting to know you.

Thank you for reading my Creep poem. What a lovely surprise to wake up today to us both being included in Paroma Sen generous and kind article.

About your lovely and thought provoking poem about Difficult. I absolutely enjoyed it and cannot wait to read more of you.

Then I kept going over your last lines that I highlighted above.

I stopped short and thought. OMG has society now found yet another way to try and silence women by swapping the word difficult for Karen?(Eli, had you not written a poem about Difficult, I don’t know if I would have made this connection: difficult/Karen.)

I know and appreciate that your excellent poem addresses much more than women, yet it certainly includes women. I also agree with you about the growth that comes from tackling labels or difficulties.

Yet there, at the end of it, went my thoughts. Karen might have started out as a comical(to some) stereotype but it does seem that more and more, almost any woman speaking out is increasingly getting pinned with this Karen label. ( as in: shhhh, don’t say anything about XXX or you might be called Karen)

First I want to say, what is the male name equivalent for speaking out? But second I want to say, wouldn’t it be better to nix the name calling no matter the gender?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this, Eli. I hope you don’t mind that you’re poem’s ending caused me to veer off in another direction. I guess this has been on my mind for awhile and I finally decide to ask what others think on the woman/difficult/silencing/Karen topic.

Wow and Whoa. Heavy stuff for us just meeting, huh. Talk soon.😊🌹