WOC— Visibility, Identity, Hope
By: Arti Sharma, Writer at and Founder of Bespoke Writing Firm, LLC., WOC Member and Radiant Graduate
This week, as Women’s History Month comes to a close, we would like to celebrate with a poem from one of our members and Radiant alum, Arti Sharma. We celebrate Arti’s writing gift, and her ability to put to words what we work in the trenches daily to achieve.
Heaping ash buried my once fiery-like voice behind a trail that blazed with obstruction.
Plumes of soot eclipsed the path forward, and my steps fumbled around for mis-fitting footing left on the hostile terrain of the fundraising sector.
Silently grappling with an uneven trajectory, I carried the remains of myself: pieces once used to fuel the flames of others in their progression.
Left behind, I was invisible in the anguish of almost-nonexistence.
Then came WOC.
Like winds traveling in a wisdom-led direction, WOC cleaned off layers of years that had gone by—gathered years that I never lived yet somehow belonged to me.
Beneath the coal-like residue were remnants—familiar yet distant echoes—of who I used to be.
Sparking these embers, WOC ignited within me a fire.
It is a fire that roars through the darkness, lighting up stories of those who came before me, those who walked similar journeys--whose stories I feel without ever being told.
It is a fire that consumes the inhospitable trail left behind, forging a path solid in unity, sustained by hope and the promise of humanity.
It is a path emblazoned with a shared narrative that will never die out, that will persist beyond the confines of time.
If this is my story, then to me WOC means visibility, identity, hope.
This organization is the source of my voice when the world works to stifle it; it is the flame that ignites my forgotten spark.
I am because of WOC; so, for me, WOC is my inarticulable gratitude.
Arti Sharma
Writer at and Founder of Bespoke Writing Firm, LLC.
WOC Member and Radiant Graduate
