Hey, do you know that feeling of hitching up a long skirt so you don’t fall on your face when walking upstairs, and then you immediately become a wretched yet resolute Jane Austen character? It’s a universal thing, right?

I wish I could take credit for this. Because it is a universal thing, for women. I can’t speak for men, but women know those moments.

Staring out the window during a rainstorm, sipping tea, listening to a sad song and feeling like a rom com character who had to break up with the “guy,” but wishing he had been…better.

Staring into a fireplace with snow falling, thinking of your ancestors who didn’t have a Zippo to light their own fires they needed to survive.

Diving into the ocean, feeling like a literary heroine in a Kate Chopin novel, wondering, “If I just keep swimming and disappear, I can start a new life.”

I have been involved in an Instagram thread that has brought me so much laughter and happiness, I thought it is the perfect way to start blogging again. To know that as women, we all have this in common. That of removing ourselves mentally and emotionally from a moment or situation, and imagining we are someone else of days gone by.

Here are some “moments” in the thread:

Washing dishes and rubbing your forehead with the back of your hand, because you suddenly realize you must churn butter for supper.

Eating stew with bread and suddenly you’re in a medieval inn eating your first hot meal after a fortnight on the road.

Running down the stairs with a long skirt, suddenly a princess escaping the castle under siege.

Your shoes making a clacking noise on a marble floor and suddenly you’re a fashion maven followed by your three assistants.

Wearing an oversize sweater with long sleeves, gripping your warm coffee mug and suddenly you’re a middle-aged successful author who writes self-help books and has slender fingers.

When it begins to rain unexpectedly and you don’t have an umbrella, so you pull your scarf over your head and suddenly now you’re an eastern European peasant woman trying to survive the Nazis.

You bring in wood for the fire, and suddenly you’re a wretched poor woman who lives alone in a small wooden shack on the moors because you wouldn’t conform and marry the middle-aged captain.

Walking along with a child on your hip and suddenly feeling like an impoverished  washerwoman with a brood of children walking to meet her husband from the mines.

Wearing a scarf over your head on a cold winter day, you turn your head to look and suddenly you’re the French Lieutenant’s woman.

Eating bread, cheese and stew and suddenly now you’re Heidi, living with Grandfather.

That’s only a small sample. Makes me proud to be a woman. The one comment from a man was:

“These comments confuse and intrigue me.”

Indeed.