Your Vote Is Personal: Why Every Woman Needs to Show Up

Hey, Best Friend. Pull up a chair, because today I need to talk to you about something that isn't skincare, isn't a Sunday reset, and isn't the fall sweater I keep telling you to treat yourself to. I need to talk to you about voting.

I know. Some of you just felt your shoulders creep up toward your ears. Politics is loud right now. It's exhausting, the comment sections are a battlefield, and a lot of us have quietly decided it's easier to just look away. So let me say this up front: I am not going to tell you who to vote for. Not today, not ever. That's between you, your conscience, and that little curtain at the polling place.

What I am going to tell you is that Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, and it matters more than most of us give it credit for. Every seat in the U.S. House is on the ballot, along with 35 Senate seats. Depending on where you live, so are governors, state lawmakers, school boards, judges, sheriffs, and ballot questions that will shape your everyday life far more than any headline ever will. This is a midterm, the kind of election so many of us skip. And that is exactly why I'm writing this.

For me, voting was never just a box to check. It was instilled in me before I was old enough to understand it. Before I could even walk, I was riding along with my grandparents as they helped people in our community get registered to vote. And on Election Day, I was right there with them at the polls. I grew up believing that's simply what you did: you showed up, and you made sure your neighbors could show up too.

And then there was the example I saw at home. One of my parents served 30 years in the United States military. Three decades of service to this country, of showing up when it was hard, of putting something bigger ahead of their own comfort. So when I turned 18, registering to vote didn't feel like some grown-up errand to get around to eventually. It felt like a responsibility I'd been raised to honor. I had watched someone I love give thirty years of their life to this country, and the least I could do was use the voice that service helped protect. Every time I cast a ballot, I carry both of those lessons with me: my grandparents' commitment to their community and my parent's thirty years of service.

It took me years to fully understand why it mattered so much to my family, but here's what they already knew: the government isn't some faraway building full of people in suits. It's the pothole you swerve around on the way to work. It's the school your kids, grandkids, nieces, and nephews walk into every morning, and whether there's a counselor in that building when one of them is struggling. It's how long it takes an ambulance to reach your street. It's your property taxes, your water bill, the lights in the park down the road, and what you pay at the pharmacy counter. Somebody decides all of that. Somebody votes on all of that. The only question is whether you had a say in who that somebody is.

That's why voting isn't a women's issue, or a young people's issue, or a retirees' issue. It's an everybody issue. When more of us show up, the people in office have to answer to more of us. The neighbor working two jobs, the parents living on a fixed income, the young woman just starting her first real job, the single mom doing school pickup alone: when they vote, they become people who can't be ignored. When they don't, the decisions still get made by whoever did show up, and those decisions land on everyone, voter or not.

Think of it like the family group chat. You can mute it if you want. The plans still get made. You just find out about them afterward, and you're stuck eating wherever everybody else picked.

Now let me talk to my women for a minute, because this is where it gets personal.

The decisions made by the people we elect don't land on all of us the same way. Over and over, they land harder on women. I'm not saying that to be dramatic. I'm saying it because when you look at what actually gets decided at the ballot box, so much of it lives in our bodies, our bank accounts, and our households.

Start with health care. What it costs. What's covered. Whether there's a clinic or a hospital with a labor and delivery unit anywhere near you. How mammograms, maternal care, and menopause care get funded. Who gets to make decisions about a woman's body and her medical care. I know my readers land in a lot of different places on those questions, and that's okay. But wherever you land, those decisions are being made by people on your ballot. That isn't abstract. That's your life.

Then there's money. Women still tend to earn less than men over a lifetime. We're more likely to step out of the workforce, or cut back our hours, to raise children or care for aging parents. And on average, we live longer, which means whatever we've saved has to stretch further. So we lean harder on Social Security and Medicare than men do. When lawmakers debate those programs, they are debating our sixties, our seventies, and our eighties. They're debating our grocery money and our roof-over-our-head money.

Then there's caregiving. The cost of childcare. Whether paid family leave exists where you live. What happens when your mother needs more help than you can give her and still keep your job. Most of the women I know are carrying some piece of that load, often quietly, often alone.

And then there's safety. Funding for domestic violence shelters and hotlines. Who serves as your local prosecutor and your sheriff. Who sits on the bench in the places where judges are elected. How seriously crimes against women get taken in your community. For some women, those decisions are the difference between getting out and not getting out.

So when I say our very lives depend on voting, I mean it literally. Our health, our paychecks, our retirement, our safety, and our children's futures all pass through the hands of people we either chose ourselves or let someone else choose for us.

And can we talk about how new this right even is?

The 19th Amendment was certified on August 26, 1920. That's barely more than a hundred years ago. There are women reading this whose grandmothers were born into a country where they could not vote. Women marched for it. They organized for decades. They were jailed for it, mocked for it, and some of them died before they ever saw it happen. They spent their whole lives fighting for something a lot of us now treat as optional.

And 1920 wasn't the finish line for every woman. Native American women weren't recognized as citizens until 1924, and even then, some states kept them away from the polls for decades longer. Asian immigrant women couldn't become citizens, and so couldn't vote, until 1952. Black women across much of the South were blocked by poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright intimidation until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Some of the women who fought hardest for the vote waited the longest to cast one.

I think about them every time I'm tempted to skip an election because I'm tired, or busy, or it's raining, or I don't love my choices. Somebody stood in a much longer line than mine, in a much more dangerous world, so that I would have this. The least I can do is use it.

I hear some of you already. "It's one vote. It's not going to change anything." Let me tell you a story.

In 2017, a race for a seat in Virginia's House of Delegates came down to an exact tie after a recount and a court fight over a single ballot. The tie was broken by putting each candidate's name in a film canister, dropping both canisters into a ceramic bowl, and drawing one out. That drawing decided which party controlled the entire chamber. One more voter, just one person who almost didn't bother, and nobody would have needed that bowl.

Races closer to home are decided by thin margins more often than you'd think, because so few people show up for them. Midterms, city council races, school board seats: these are the elections where your single vote carries the most weight, precisely because so many people sit them out.

And if you still think your vote doesn't matter, ask yourself this: why would anyone work so hard to keep it from you? Nobody builds a wall around something worthless. Those poll taxes, literacy tests, and threats at the courthouse door weren't random. They were built by people who understood exactly how much power sits in a single ballot, and they aimed all of it at the voters they didn't want heard.

It didn't stay in the history books, either. In 2024, voters in New Hampshire picked up the phone and heard an AI-generated voice that sounded like the president, telling them to skip their primary and "save" their vote for November. That was a lie, because you can vote in both, and federal regulators fined the political consultant behind it $6 million. Every election season brings its share of texts, flyers, and posts with the wrong date, the wrong polling place, or the false promise that you can vote by text. Nobody goes to that much trouble over something that doesn't count.

So here's how I see it, best friend. If your vote didn't matter, nobody would be trying to take it from you, confuse you out of it, or talk you out of using it. All that effort to keep some of us home is the loudest proof there is that our showing up changes things. Don't hand them that win.

And here's something that should make you sit up a little straighter. Women have voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, and there are millions more women registered to vote than men. We are not a small group politely asking for a seat at the table. We are most of the room. We don't all vote the same way, and we don't have to. But that gap between women and men tends to shrink in midterm years, which tells me exactly where our untapped power is sitting.

So here's your best-friend game plan, and I promise it fits into even your busiest week.

Start by making sure you're actually registered. Don't assume. Go to vote.gov, which will send you straight to your state's official election site, and check your status. Every state has its own rules and deadlines, so get your answers from the official source, not from something your coworker's cousin posted. If your state's registration deadline has already passed, look into whether you can register on Election Day where you live. And if you can't this time, register the day after the election so you're ready for the next one.

Then make a real plan, not a vague intention. Look up your polling place, even if you've voted before, because locations change. Find out whether your state offers early voting or mail-in ballots, and what ID you'll need to bring. Pick the exact time you're going and put it in your calendar like a doctor's appointment you refuse to cancel. Pull up a sample ballot ahead of time and spend twenty minutes with the races further down the page, not just the names at the top. The school board and the county commission and the judges are where so much of real life gets decided.

And please, bring your girls. Text your sister, your best friend, your mama, the coworker who always says she's going to vote and then somehow doesn't. Make it a date: vote, then grab coffee or tacos after. Offer a ride to the neighbor who doesn't drive anymore. Some of the most powerful political organizing in history started with women simply talking to other women.

And if you've sat out elections before? There's no shame here, best friend. I'm not interested in beating up the woman you used to be. She was doing the best she could with what she knew, what she was carrying, and how tired she was. You know a little more now. Let this version of you lead.

So here's my ask, from one best friend to another. Don't sit this one out. Not because somebody told you how to vote. Not because a celebrity posted about it. Do it because your health, your money, your safety, and your future are on that ballot whether you show up or not. Do it for the women who fought for a right some of them never got to use. And do it for the girls coming up behind us, who are watching what we do far more closely than they listen to what we say.

You don't have to love politics. You don't have to have every answer figured out. You just have to show up and take the seat that the women before us built with their own two hands.

I'll see you at the polls, Best Friend! And wear something cute!