Reflecting on Yesterday’s International Women’s Day

In case you missed it, yesterday was International Women's Day -- a day where women around the world are (hopefully) put on the pedestal they deserve, shown love, respect, appreciation, and everything in between. And I have to say, unlike most days where my social media feed is generally 25% hilarious posts, 25% harmless posts/life updates, and 50% whining -- my feed was pretty much 100% love yesterday, and I loved it.

I saw genuine, heartfelt posts from men highlighting the strength of their wives, daughters, sisters, mother's, grandmothers, aunts, best friends -- any woman in their lives, really, while also highlighting the love and appreciation they have for them. I saw men that I'm friends with who don't usually show any emotional or feelings (not that they're heartless, they just don't outwardly show emotions), show them yesterday.

Even better -- I saw women celebrating other women, which I feel like is a message that has been passed around and pleaded for on social media for years now. Which, honestly, I think is important in a day and age when the Real Housewives of (insert city here) are still a thing on BRAVO and primarily successful because of how vicious (seems like the right word) women can be toward each other.

I mean, just look at the last few episodes of Real Housewives of New Jersey, with Teresa Giudice starting/spreading/participating in cheating rumors about one of the other castmates' husbands, causing a massive rift between the two women and smack talk following it -- it was just next-level amazing to see all of the posts about women highlighting other women, be it a friend, a boss, a family member, or even someone they don't necessarily know, but idolize. (Also, don't ask how I know so much about Real Housewives -- we all have our random guilty pleasures.)

But on top of just seeing the awesome support of women everywhere, I learned a lesson yesterday. And I feel like it's one I've sort of always known it, but it was just SCREAMING to me yesterday following this post I made on all of my personal socials:

Now, compared to what I saw other friends post on their socials -- these long, heartfelt words about the women in their lives -- my post isn't really much of anything. But between the response on my Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and this Instagram post -- it got some decent traction. Which helped provide at least part of an answer for the almighty elusive question -- "What do women want?"

Well, based on the response my essentially 4-word post got -- they want to be respected, and they want to feel appreciated. That's literally the BASICS of any human relationship, isn't it? I don't want this next line to make it sound like I'm glorifying myself, because I'm very much not meaning to, but I'm using it as an example -- I literally just said "respect" and "thank you," and the response was insane. IT WAS THAT SIMPLE.

I think all of us -- men, women, children, heck even pets -- I think we all need to learn from what we saw and learned yesterday. We all make mistakes in how we present ourselves to each other sometimes. We aren't perfect. We all say things we shouldn't -- whether it's out of anger, a failed joke that we think will be funny but really isn't, thinking we're reading a situation correctly when we're not, or just having a terrible approach even though you may mean well -- but it's how we learn and grow from those mistakes that we should focus on.

And let's even take it a step further -- why stop at just ONE day to show love, appreciation, and respect to women? Everyone in general, yes, but especially women. It doesn't always have to be highlighted on social media, but why not make the women in your life, no matter the capacity, feel the way they seemed to all feel yesterday, but EVERYDAY?

Anyway. I personally learned a lot from International Women's Day yesterday, and I hope you did too, or learned something from this reflection on it. Like I said yesterday -- RESPECT. And THANK YOU, women of the world. And everyone else that deserves it, too.