I saw a quote the other day that kind of rocked my world: “There is no competition among wild women. They are too damn wild to be caught in a tiny space of envy. Instead, they dance together and allow the good to flow abundantly to them.”

I have a really hard time accepting compliments. It’s not that I brush them off, or discourage them. My problem is that I get so excited about receiving a compliment, I sort of disassociate. I’m not really there to receive the kind words. I get this fleeting hit of goodness, but I can’t quite remember what was said, or by whom. It makes me wonder if the problem isn’t the compliment, but the act of receiving that is my problem. Receiving is tricky business for women. We are implicitly taught that our greatest good is always in giving.

A few days ago, a group of us treated ourselves to cocktails, dinner and Magic Mike XL. I’m not usually a male stripper kind of person, but after seeing Mr. Tatum’s performance in Magic Mike #1, there was a zero percent chance of missing a redux. As we sat drinking our margaritas, each of us shared the high and low points of our summers thus far. It was remarkable how fundamentally similar our situations were.

A few months ago, during one of our “fun” weekends away together, my two best friends forced me to watch an episode of that BBC series The Fall. In case you've never seen it, It stars Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson. Jamie is a serial killer of women (I felt extremely confused watching certain scenes in 50 Shades of Grey because of this), and Gillian is his brilliant detective foil. The episode we watched ended with Dornan working very hard to choke a woman who is tied to a bed.