Gloria Steinem died this week at 92. Dolly Parton died last week at 80. 

There are people whose deaths feel strangely personal even though we never knew them.

Gloria and Dolly are two of those people for me.

Maybe because I am 63 and grew up when the rules for women were changing dramatically.

Maybe because I entered the workforce in the 1980s, when women of my generation were walking through doors that had been pushed open by women like these.

Or maybe because, just days after her death, I watched the Netflix documentary Famous Last Words: Gloria Steinem and found myself deeply moved by what she chose to leave us with.

Two of her final messages have stayed with me:

Know each other through stories.

And:

Be the unique person you are.

Those words feel particularly meaningful now.

Because as I reflect on Gloria’s life, I realize how much of my own life has been shaped by both.

I Benefited From a Revolution I Didn’t Start

I started my professional career in the 1980s.

By then, women were entering universities, professions, boardrooms and leadership positions in numbers that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work. I built a career. I became an entrepreneur, consultant, coach, speaker, author, and podcast host.

I have sat in boardrooms.

I’ve advised leaders.

I’ve built a business.

I’ve helped curate and coach women for the TEDx stage.

I’ve written books.

I’ve had the privilege of using my voice publicly.

And while I worked hard for those opportunities, I also understand something more clearly today:

I didn’t open all of those doors.

Women before me did.

Gloria Steinem and countless other women questioned systems that generations had simply accepted.

Why couldn’t women do certain jobs?

Why weren’t women paid equally?

Why weren’t our voices represented in the rooms where decisions were being made?

Why were women expected to organize their lives around rules they had little role in creating?

And Gloria wasn’t the only kind of woman showing my generation what was possible.

I think about Dolly Parton, another female icon who has been present throughout virtually my entire life.

Dolly’s version of power looked very different from Gloria’s—and maybe that’s precisely why both women matter to me.

Gloria challenged our ideas about what a woman was allowed to do.

Dolly challenged our ideas about what a powerful woman was supposed to look and sound like while she did it.

Dolly didn’t become less feminine to be taken seriously. She didn’t hide her roots. She didn’t become someone else’s version of sophisticated, intelligent or successful.

She became more completely Dolly.

In very different ways, both women gave my generation permission to question the boxes women had been placed inside.

And perhaps that is why Gloria’s final words resonate so strongly with me now:

Be the unique person you are.

There isn’t one right way to be a strong woman.

There isn’t one right way to lead.

There isn’t one right way to use your voice.

My generation inherited some of the freedoms women like Gloria fought for and women like Dolly embodied in their own distinctive ways.

We didn’t inherit equality.

We still haven’t achieved that.

But we inherited possibility.

And that changed my life’s trajectory.

Yes, I Am a Feminist

Someone once told me that I was too liberal and too feminist—too far in one direction for a lot of people’s comfort.

I did ask, but… okay.

Yes.

I am passionate about women.

I am passionate about women’s rights and the inequality that still exists today.

I believe women deserve equal opportunity, equal voice, and equal power in the decisions that affect our lives.

I believe girls should grow up knowing that their voices matter before the world teaches them to question whether they do.

So, yes, I am a feminist.

But I’ve also come to understand that standing up for women doesn’t require me to stand against men.

I want something bigger than that.

I want women and men to be liberated from the narrow roles we’ve inherited.

I want us to become curious about one another.

I want us to question systems that rank human beings.

And I want us to recognize something Gloria articulated throughout her life:

We are linked, not ranked.

Know Each Other Through Stories

Of everything I heard in Gloria’s final interview, this may have touched me most.

Know each other through stories.

Because when I look back, story has been the thread running through so much of my life’s work.

For eight years, I helped curate and coach women for the TEDx stage.

Again and again, I watched women stand in front of those red letters and share their ideas and talk about something they had experienced, survived, discovered, or finally understood.

A story could change a room.

Sometimes telling it changed the woman.

Eventually, I had to tell my own.

Writing Oh God of Second Chances, Here I Am Again required me to look honestly at my choices, mistakes, heartbreaks, resilience, and reinvention.

I learned that our stories aren’t valuable because we’ve done everything right.

They’re valuable because they’re ours.

And today, through my podcast, Second Chances with Christy Belz, I have the privilege of sitting across from people and asking them to tell me theirs.

What happened?

What did you learn?

Who did you become?

Where was your second chance?

Because when we really know someone’s story, something changes.

Labels become less useful.

Judgment becomes harder.

Curiosity becomes possible.

And compassion has somewhere to enter.

Perhaps that’s why Gloria’s words felt so familiar.

I’ve spent much of my career trying to help people know one another through stories.

I just hadn’t named it quite that way.

I Want to Be Reincarnated as Gloria Steinem

After watching the documentary, I was reminded of a poem written by Gloria’s dear friend Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

Its title is:

“I Want to Be Reincarnated as Gloria Steinem.”

I love the sentiment.

Who wouldn’t want some of Gloria’s courage, wit, curiosity, perseverance and commitment to justice?

But Gloria’s own final words seem to offer an interesting response:

Be the unique person you are.

Maybe we’re not supposed to become Gloria.

Maybe we’re supposed to become ourselves.

At 63, those words mean something very different to me than they would have at 23.

How much of our lives do we spend becoming who we’re supposed to be?

The good girl.

The wife.

The mother.

The successful woman.

The caretaker.

The leader.

The one who can handle everything.

We learn to read the room.

We learn what gets rewarded.

We learn what makes other people uncomfortable.

And sometimes, without realizing it, we begin editing ourselves.

Perhaps part of this stage of life is to stop editing.

To stop asking:

Who do you need me to be?

And instead ask:

Who am I now?

And Then There Are Rose and Audrey

This is where Gloria’s words became even more personal for me.

Because I realized that the torch isn’t something I need to figure out how to pass someday.

It’s already being passed.

My children’s book series, The Brick and the Sponge, was created to help children understand something that took many of us adults decades to learn: people experience, process and express the world differently.

But I didn’t want to create books for young people without young people helping create them.

That brought two extraordinary 13-year-old girls into my life and into these books: Audrey and Rose.

Audrey helped bring the original Brick and Sponge world to life through her art.

And Rose joined me in creating Friendship, Feelings, and Finding Your Voice, bringing the perspective of a girl actually living the friendships, emotions and challenges we were writing about.

Think about that.

A 63-year-old woman and 13-year-old girls creating stories together about finding your voice.

Fifty years between us.

That is the torch.

And I don’t want Audrey and Rose simply to listen to what I’ve learned.

I want to listen to what they know.

What does friendship feel like at 13 today?

What are girls afraid to say?

What pressures do they experience that my generation never did?

What do they see that adults don’t?

What do they want us to understand?

Their voices aren’t decoration around an adult’s idea.

Their voices are part of the idea.

That feels incredibly important to me.

Passing the Torch Doesn’t Mean Passing Down the Answers

Maybe I’ve misunderstood passing the torch.

I used to think it meant one generation accumulating wisdom and eventually handing it to the next.

Now I think it’s much more interesting than that.

It’s a conversation.

We tell them our stories.

They tell us theirs.

We share what we’ve learned.

We listen to what they already know.

We tell them where we’ve been.

And then we get out of the damn way enough to see where they want to go.

Gloria’s generation pushed open doors that had been closed to women for generations.

My generation walked through many of those doors.

We built careers.

We became leaders.

We raised families while working.

We entered boardrooms.

We started businesses.

We found our voices.

And we also discovered plenty of doors that are still closed—or only partially open.

Now another generation is coming.

Our job isn’t to tell them who to become.

Our job is to hold the door open and say:

Go be the unique person you are.

The Torch Is Ours Now

I don’t want to be Gloria Steinem.

I don’t want to be Dolly Parton.

I want to be Christy Belz.

Fully.

Imperfectly.

And increasingly, unapologetically.

And I want Audrey to be Audrey.

I want Rose to be Rose.

I want every girl coming behind us to have the freedom to discover who she is without spending half her life unlearning who the world told her she was supposed to be.

That is how I want to honor women like Gloria Steinem.

Not by putting them on pedestals.

Not by trying to become them.

But by picking up what they carried.

By continuing to question inequality.

By telling our stories.

By listening deeply to stories different from our own.

By using our voices.

By helping another woman—or girl—find hers.

And then by handing the torch forward.

Gloria’s generation wasn’t supposed to finish the work.

Neither is mine.

Our job is to move it forward.

Someday, a girl I will never meet may stand somewhere I couldn’t have imagined, using a voice she never had to fight to believe mattered.

She may never know Gloria’s story.

She certainly may never know mine.

And that’s okay.

She will be living the legacy of both.

Thank you, Gloria, for pushing open the doors.

We’ll take it from here.

And Rose, Audrey, and all the girls coming behind us?

We can’t wait to see where you take it next.