sherah blog.

I need a blog. Just a place to jot down my thoughts. To follow my train of them, if I can, by looking back. I tried out every platform. I am very savvy in WordPress and Squarespace. I checked out Wix and Blogger and self-hosted Ghost, I did a newsletter format on Substack, I tried abbreviated ones on micro.blog and Bluesky. I just don't like them. So I came back and revived my old tumblr here. Is it cringey? Probably.

If you design and create a product or a business, you *are* responsible for the impact it has on other humans and the world.

— Hilary Mason (@hmason)

A man in India went to great lengths to research and develop low-cost, safe sanitary pads for women after learning that only 10-20%t of all girls and women in India have access to proper menstrual hygiene products.

When I was eight years old, I told my whole family that I wanted to be the President of the United States when I grew up. I was visiting my grandparents in Mississippi, and my aunts and uncles and parents and brothers were around to hear me say it. This was probably a holiday of some kind, the timing of which I had most likely planned to make my announcement on in advance.

I wanted to hold an election for the Presidency of the Family, to prove that I had what it took to be the actual President someday. My dad had, after all, warned me that I would need “a lot of experience in politics” before I became the President, so I wanted to get a jumpstart at eight years old. I was enamored with being “the youngest X in the world” at the time, X being such titles as “songwriter” (I wrote and recorded my first song, a country song about birds, at age 9), and radio show host (I pretended to have a radio show when I recorded bits of the radio and then my voice over those bits all the time).

So, at age eight, inside the little brick house where my family had just finished having a leisurely dinner, I distributed handmade ballots for the Presidency of the Family. The candidates were three: me, my brother Randy (six years old at the time), and my brother Zachary (three).

“We don’t want to have to pick someone, you’re all special to us!” my stupid, stupid family would say as I went around reminding them to vote after they had just put their ballots down on the table like it was a game.

“Why are you doing this?” Grandma asked.

“Because I want to be the President of the United States someday.”

“Don’t you mean the First Lady?”

“Um, nope, I want to run the country, my husband can be the First Lady.”

Sometimes I think about this story when I hear about young women who have been told from early on that they can’t do something men can do. I’m sure that my Grandma, the strongest and most nurturing force in my life, was positive that I could do anything I wanted to do, but the culture we come from paints lines around our experiences, puts things neatly into buckets in ways that are no longer acceptable but still exist for others as orderly, logical tradition.

That’s the case for Malala Yousafzai, a young woman from Pakistan, a Nobel Prize-winning activist for women’s rights to education. I recently watched He Named Me Malala, a documentary made about her life, which is a beautiful film that made me cry all over myself until I was a pathetic pile of goo.

Malala was shot in the left side of her head by the Taliban as she secretly attended class in the back of a hidden school bus in her hometown, because girls are banned from going to school in the Swat Valley of Pakistan.

“There are many problems, but I think there is a solution to all these problems; it’s just one, and it’s education.” -Malala Yousafzai

In my work at the Wikimedia Foundation, I have seen many people from around the world speaking in this way about education. Like many people in the US, I’ve taken it for granted that I had structured education for at least 13 years of my life and complain about my student loan debt. But imagine not even having the option. Imagine being shot in the face in the 10th grade for doing it.

Sadly, my entire platform when I was eight years old and running for President of the Family was literally “burn down all the schools so we can party!”. I was not elected.