The Women Who Challenge Us Are the Ones Who Expand Our Power
Supporting other women isn’t about agreeing with them — it’s about choosing growth, understanding, and respect even when perspectives differ.
Women’s growth is often portrayed as mentorship or support, but sometimes our greatest growth comes from women who lovingly disrupt the narratives we thought defined us.
Ever since I was a child, I knew I wanted to tell stories, and my biggest goal was to share my family’s experiences with violence in Colombia—something that had affected me deeply growing up and that, absurdly, remained hidden in my family’s most obscure memories.
When I arrived at the Savannah College of Art and Design—a place where women from radically different backgrounds enter carrying their own histories, ambitions, and truths—I met Ale. She seemed to have the same mission, and when I learned she was a historian from Colombia, my eyes lit up. I invited her to join my first project, which explored my aunt’s experiences with bombs and violence while she was a teenager in Medellín. I never expected her perspective to challenge the very foundation of what I believed to be truth.
Ale is from Bogotá, the capital—a city that experienced the same war as my family did, but from a very different position. While my family’s view was shaped and wounded by the painful experiences we carried deep in our hearts—the guerrilla kidnapping of my grandfather and great-grandfather, the abduction of my grandmother’s siblings, the murder attempts that almost killed my great-grandparents, and countless other horrors—Ale saw the war from a different place. For the first time, I understood that women can carry the same history and still inherit completely different truths from it. While it seemed inconceivable to me to forgive the people I had grown up believing were evil, she could see good in them. She fought to make peace and to change our story to bring justice. Her perspective didn’t erase my pain; it expanded my understanding of how strength can look different, including the willingness to see humanity where it feels hardest.
It is easy and comfortable to surround yourself with women who mirror your beliefs, but my friendship with Ale has become the most meaningful and transformative relationship of my life. She has become the person I’ve learned the most from—not because she validates my thoughts, but because she expands them. She stimulates my thinking, questions my viewpoints, and helps me grow while allowing herself to grow alongside me. There are some things we don’t agree on, but that’s fine, because just the act of listening and understanding each other makes all the difference. Real sisterhood is not built on agreement; it is built on the courage to remain present in conversations that challenge who we are.
Colombia’s armed conflict, which has persisted for over 60 years, is one of the most complex conflicts in Latin America (I learned this from Ale). Conversations like ours—where women choose dialogue over certainty—have the power to heal not only countries, but communities, industries, and generations. Since that first project, we’ve worked on films nonstop, always contributing to each other’s perspectives. Ale taught me that growth is rarely found in comfort. It is found in the women brave enough to challenge us, question us, and stand beside us while we become more complex, more empathetic, and ultimately stronger versions of ourselves.
