As a girl, one of the best things you can do is surround yourself with people you look up to. That goes for anyone, actually, but if you're a girl, it is critical to have strong, powerful, influential girls and women in your life.

Feminism is going places it's never gone before, and taking risks that women have been unwilling to take until now, and that's great. That's the direction we need this world to go in, because women have always had it hard and anyone with human decency and a mild regard for humanitarianism would understand that.

Being a girl is hard. I don't say that to bring up the anatomic concepts like menstruation and birthing or even the idea that women had to fight for their right to vote or to make the same amount of money doing the same things men do.

I mean, there is that. I've never understood how females physically bring males into this world, and into existence, and still get treated as less than equal. I think if anything, it should be the other way around. But that's just me, and that's not even my point.

My point is that I've been lucky.

I've been very lucky. I've always been taught, coached, mothered, befriended, loved, cared for, and brought up by women that have impacted my life to such an insane degree that I would not be the person I am today, or be living the life I live today, if it were not for them.

Eternal gratitude is definitely a thing, and is definitely something I have learned from them, and will always be something I owe to them.

My mother taught me that climbing trees was equally okay as wearing high heels and I'll never forget that. My teachers showed me that I was capable of doing everything equally as well as or better than the boys in my classes regardless of anyone else's opinion, and if it weren't for that lesson I wouldn't be writing this post right now. My dance coaches taught me that men are strong but that women can be strong too, and are, and that women should never shy away from competition or confrontation with men, because superiority comes down to character, not gender.

Feminism is not an issue of superiority. Feminism is an issue of equality.

I have nothing but the strongest confidence in the women I know and love, and in the woman they've turned me into, and if I can only say one thing now, it's that the world doesn't know what's coming.