Fighting Paper Dolls

I was trained to use my words as a spear and shield that could go through an opponent's arguments and shield me from any imaginable rebuttal. But when the war was over, and my opponent looked behind me I was nothing but a Paper Doll - hollow, flat, empty and cold to touch.

This was my fate in this unimaginable struggle as a Female, African American, Engineer...... ME.

There is a time in every woman's education when she arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that she must take herself for better, for worse, as her portion......... The power which resides in her is new in nature, and none but she knows what that is which she can do, nor does she know until she has tried.-----Emerson