Agency: my entire life has been predicated on achieving this.

I have sought it more than love, more than enlightenment, more than self-awareness. I did not think I could have those things until I achieved Agency.

From where does this most basic human desire arise? The need to be in complete and total control of one’s own life, one’s body, one’s choices? To have no one, not a parent, not a spouse, not a friend, be able to control what you do with your life?

And why does it make men like Trump crazy when women achieve it?

In my little child mind, I intuited that the acquisition of money was the one and only true path to agency.

If you could pay for yourself, then you owed no one.

This became my singular goal, one I pursued with zeal.

Funny thing, I pursued it in a counterintuitive manner. I obeyed all the rules. I became the quiet, behind-the-scenes little worker bee that everybody could rely on.

I got squashed along the way, but I never took money from anyone that I did not immediately pay back. I worked for every cent. For every apartment. For every car. For every insurance premium. For every vacation. For every notebook, every pen, every computer.

Virginia Woolf taught me that I must have A Room Of My Own if I wanted to be creative. I took her to heart.

It would require millions of words to recount all the obstacles along the way. The men who took credit for my work. The men who got the bonuses for my sweat. The men who insisted they owned me because I worked for them. The men who tried to insult me for my feminism, my fashion-ignorant attire, my weight. The women who agreed with them, who saw me as an aberration of nature.

But that’s not what I want to remember. What I want to remember is this:

I am the sole agent of my destiny.

Girls. Seek the route to your agency. But only if that’s what you truly want.