Still Blooming

I want to start here, because otherwise I don’t think I could write this at all.

What we do at sariKNOTsari matters. Not in a grand, world-saving way, but in a real one. It’s a space where women are encouraged to trust their own thinking and take up space without apology, to exist as whole people rather than fragments of who they are allowed to be.

I didn’t plan to write a blog like this. But it’s been difficult to avoid what’s been circulating — references to the Epstein files appearing in headlines, on social feeds, even folded into late-night comedy. For a long time, the idea that terrible things happen somewhere else felt abstract. Another grim truth layered onto an already fragile world. I’m generally quite stoic when it comes to the news. I take in information, I process it, and I move straight into fixer mode.

That’s usually how it goes.

This time, I read specific details. And something in me gave way.

What hit me wasn’t just that abuse occurred; it was how the girls were spoken about. How completely their humanity was removed. It wasn’t even just dehumanization. It felt like reduction — like their existence had been narrowed to parts rather than personhood. As though identity itself was incidental. Once that registers, it doesn’t easily leave you.

I went from wanting to vomit to crying, and then the fixer part of me tried to take over — the part that jumps in when something feels unbearable and immediately starts asking what can be done. But this time it didn’t get very far. The tears were already there.

Another part of me tried to place it in history, to make it less shocking by reminding myself that abuse and misogyny are not new. I thought about geisha culture, about child brides, about foot binding, about widows who once threw themselves onto funeral pyres because survival without a man meant social erasure anyway. None of that made this feel smaller. It just made the pattern harder to ignore.

When I first started writing this, all I could think about was the impact of those files and how young girls’ lives were erased.

And then, almost as if the world wanted to layer the theme, I started watching a television show set in Texas called Landman. It’s polished and dramatic and easy to consume. But what unsettled me was how the mother and daughter seem to primarily exist in relation to men — their value tied to desirability, their stability dependent on someone else’s approval. It’s presented as normal. Comfortable, even.

At the same time, Shefali chose “bloom” as the theme for our live. There wasn’t a strategy session about it. She just said it — bloom. We were surrounded by the flowers printed on our silk pieces, and suddenly I was thinking about the contrast. Girls whose humanity had been erased. Fictional women who orbit male satisfaction. And here we were, holding fabric covered in flowers that insist on returning every spring.

Blooming isn’t passive. Flowers don’t simply sit there waiting to be admired; they push through frozen ground, and even after being cut back, they come again. There’s something quietly insistent about that.

As older women, we have something steadier than we did at twenty. Not perfection. Not certainty. But a kind of earned confidence that allows us to show up as ourselves in rooms that once intimidated us. Younger women who are just beginning to bloom into themselves are watching that, whether we mean them to or not.

If shrinking is all they see around them — in the stories we absorb and the systems we live inside — that can quietly become the template. But when they see women who are strong, resilient, and unapologetically individual, another possibility exists alongside it.

That’s where sariKNOTsari feels important to me again. Not as a solution to global injustice, but as a small, lived refusal to make women smaller. A place where taking up space isn’t radical, it’s simply normal.

We are more than flowers.

And at the same time, maybe we are exactly like them — rooted, seasonal, capable of starting again after something cold.