I'm thinking of writing this blog to my younger self, as a kind of bridge to other women, and people in general, most of whom by now are younger than me. But that gets weirdly complicated, because I'm still my younger self, only she's been around longer than she knew.

It's great to be experiencing a resurgence of feminism ... except that it means there was a lapse. That's partly why I want to write to the me who didn't foresee the backlash. And backlash it was - feminism goes through cycles, but not because it melts away, or gets tired, or becomes unnecessary. Just like all progressive movements, it gets suppressed. If you don't believe me, take a look at Pulizer prizewinner Susan Faludi's book.

One of the effects of the sort of attack she details by the kinds of men who still for some unaccountable reason want to maintain patriarchy and all its crap is to alienate young women from older women - and a host of mythical and arbitrarily homogenized groups from each other.

So I want to discuss with my younger self how the two of us let Utopia blur our vision instead of clarifying it. It's going to take some time to explore this thought.

(The next bit was my SECOND POST. I'm checking out why it looks like part of the first one. Bear with me!)

DIALOGUE BEFORE ADVICE

I went to sleep having just seen the Twitter flurry about the BBC Woman’s Hour item on advice to younger women. It's good, because it focused for me that I don't want to offer advice, either to my younger self or, especially, to younger women. What I wrote in my first post above actually does get a bit too close to that. It wasn't meant to.

I woke to a very vivid dream - I put it that way ('to' a dream) because that's how it felt; not that I'd been dreaming and woke up, but that the waking was also the dream, within a dream, within a dream, to infinity.

I was standing on something that was either a tall pier or a cliff, telling my mother (who wasn’t there, but nevertheless to whom I was speaking) about a dream I’d had. In the dream, I am a beautiful mixed race young woman (!) (In the part of life we assume isn't dream, I’m none of these, as far as I know, apart from the last).  I am both watching the action and performing it.

The dream I am recounting to my present-absent mother is that I have jumped off the cliff. Mid-fall, I begin to enjoy the descent, right at the moment I begin to turn and adopt a pose like virabidrasana 2 (warrior in yoga, strong, purposeful). I'm still descending, but it's no longer a falling. I bend my front arm to blow a kiss and turn to look joyfully at someone watching.

Yet all the time I know I have dreamt this dream before, and that this time it’s for real. I’ve leapt off, possibly to my death, but it doesn't matter. It feels I have leapt to my life.

What I take this dream to mean is that my younger self is reminding me to follow the instincts she followed when she left pretty much all she had been trying to be and reinvented herself - or rather, returned to herself with a new sense that she wasn't just one person.

So I was asking the wrong question in my first post – it’s not to ask why Utopia blurred my/her vision. It’s perhaps to explore how Utopia was necessary, and to (re)gain the greater clarity about what an idealised vision can and can’t do.