As we collectively mourn the heartbreaking passing of legendary activist Gloria Steinem , I am also grieving the loss of someone who, for over 30 years, was one of my most treasured mentors, friends and collaborators.

For more than six decades, as a journalist, author, organizer and activist, Gloria helped transform the women’s movement and our culture, expanding possibilities for generations of women while advocating for racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental causes and other interconnected movements for equality.

She cofounded Ms. magazine , the Ms. Foundation for Women , Women’s Media Center and the National Women’s Political Caucus , among other organizations and initiatives, and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

But as celebrated, accomplished and influential an icon as she was, I think it is equally important to understand—from someone fortunate enough to have spent time with her in many different capacities over the years—what she was like behind the scenes.

Gloria was endlessly generous, humble, warm, curious, authentic, joyful and funny. She had a remarkable ability to make people feel seen and valued. And one of the things I admired most about her was that she never seemed to believe she had finished learning. She remained open to new people, perspectives and generations, and even at 92 never lost her passion for creating community and change, something she did, in part, through Gloria’s Foundation by regularly holding gatherings and Talking Circles at her New York home, which she dedicated as a center for organizing and activism.

I first interviewed Gloria more than three decades ago and had the enormous privilege of interviewing her numerous times since about her activism, writing and the women’s movement, as well as broader questions about courage, leadership, aging, hope and how change happens. In fact, I had been preparing to interview Gloria again next month about her forthcoming book, An Unexpected Life . It is heartbreaking to know that conversation will never happen.

I am particularly grateful now for a much more recent memory: just months ago, I convened an intimate gathering on the State of Feminism at Gloria’s home, bringing together an intergenerational group of feminist leaders and activists. It feels especially poignant now to picture her there, still doing what she had done throughout her life: bringing people together, listening, learning, connecting, encouraging us to strategize together and share actions, and helping us imagine what might be possible next.

As she expressed at that gathering, “We only experience real empathy when we are flooded with oxytocin, which is what happens when we are together. And it’s crucial that we are together in the most diverse ways possible because otherwise oxytocin is not unifying in the way that it should be. It isn’t that our computers and our books and our writing are not important, but this is more powerful.”

Over the course of our many conversations, I have accumulated a treasured archive of Gloria’s words of wisdom. But I’ve also learned from watching how she lived and worked. So much of what Gloria believed wasn’t merely something she said. It was how she lived.

At a moment when so much of what Gloria spent her life fighting for feels at stake, the wisdom she leaves us seems more urgent than ever. Here are some of the lessons I learned from Gloria Steinem—through her words, her work and the extraordinary example of her life.

We Are “Linked, Not Ranked”

One of the phrases I most associate with Gloria is “We are linked, not ranked.”

Years ago, as part of a campaign we partnered on, I asked Gloria to choose a phrase that encapsulated her philosophy. She chose those five words. When I later asked her to explain what they meant to her, Gloria told me, “Viewing the world as linked, not ranked, is profoundly different from viewing it in a hierarchical way, which causes you to label everyone with their place in the hierarchy. It’s the paradigm that was the paradigm of societies for most of human history, and still is of some, and that is the circle not the pyramid. That we are literally linked in a circle, including with nature, as well as with other human beings.”

She explained that hierarchy keeps us preoccupied with becoming “more than” or avoiding becoming “less than,” when what we really long for is to become “part of.”

She also told me: “We need power to , not power over . Power to do, accomplish, create—not power over other people.”

It is difficult to think of a more succinct expression of Gloria’s intersectional vision: that struggles for equality, justice and the well-being of all people and the planet are fundamentally connected.

For all the attention Gloria received as an individual icon, she knew that movements were not built by individuals. She believed profoundly in community and in the power of people coming together. “The most effective means we have is to talk to each other in groups,” she once told me. “We’re communal people. You can’t do it by yourself.”

That idea was central to how Gloria understood social change. She talked about the importance of creating spaces where women could “speak their truths and their experiences and find they’re not alone in them, that other women have them too.” As she put it, “It makes such a huge difference.”

That is one reason the memory of gathering in Gloria’s home so recently feels especially meaningful to me now. She was still creating circles. Still bringing people together in community. Still listening. And she reminded us repeatedly that none of us has to do this alone.

Listen, Keep Learning And Stay Open

Gloria was a great speaker, but one of her most extraordinary gifts was something quieter: she listened.

She didn’t stop learning because she had become famous. She didn’t assume that decades of activism meant she already had all the answers. She remained curious about people whose experiences differed from her own, younger generations, new movements and new ideas.

When I interviewed Gloria about her memoir My Life on the Road , she talked about how important it was, even in an increasingly digital world, to actually be physically present with one another. “We still need to be together,” she told me. “There’s no substitute for it. Even the Internet can’t substitute for people being in the room together. We still need to be able to empathize with each other. ”

For Gloria, being on the road was also about remaining open to the unexpected—to people, experiences and ideas that might challenge what she thought she knew. As she explained, “The road forces you to live in the present.”

That openness and curiosity were fundamental to who Gloria was. She kept listening, questioning and growing. That, too, is part of her legacy.

One of my favorite things Gloria ever told me was about how she approached life and what kept her going after so many years of doing this work. She told me, “Some people live in the past, some people live in the present, which is probably the most rewarding, and some people live in the future. I live in the future, so I am always thinking, ‘What if?’ or ‘This could be’ or ‘This could change’ or trying to understand why something happens. The great joy to me is that moment—that ‘aha!’—when you think, ‘Oh, that’s why!’ That excitement and pleasure in realizing why something is happening and how it could be different, that definitely keeps me going.”

I think this is fundamental to understanding Gloria’s activism. She wasn’t simply protesting the world as it was. She was continually imagining the world as it could be—and then working to make that imagined future real.

Gloria didn’t only impart lessons to me in interviews. Some of the lessons that affected me most came in personal moments.

At a celebration marking the publication of my first book, Gloria put her arm around me, looked me in the eyes and told me I should feel proud of what I had accomplished. My instinct was to immediately deflect the praise. I told her I was really just a conduit for all the inspiring thought leaders and organizations whose voices I had been fortunate enough to amplify.

Gloria gently stopped me. She told me not to defer the moment outward, but to take it in, give myself credit and value my own accomplishments.

On another occasion, she encouraged me simply to “ask for what I need.”

These may sound like small pieces of advice, but for many women, they are anything but small. Gloria understood that changing the world also requires women to believe in the value of their own voices and contributions.

Over the many years I interviewed Gloria, I often asked her how she maintained hope in the face of injustice, setbacks and the seemingly endless work still to be done.

Her answer was never naïve optimism, and she explained why pessimism could be its own obstacle: “Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It means you’ve already lost before you begin.”

For Gloria, optimism wasn’t about denying the difficulty of the work. It was about making the work possible. “Hope is a form of planning,” she told me. And another time, she put it even more simply: “We can create our own hope.”

Hope, as Gloria practiced it, wasn’t passive. It was something we maintained through action.

The State of Women’s Progress

When I asked Gloria several years ago where she felt we were in the arc of women’s progress, she acknowledged what had been achieved while emphasizing how much remained to be done.

“I think we’ve just begun,” she told me. “We’ve accomplished some very important tasks. First, we know we’re not crazy, the system is crazy. And this is very important. Second, we’ve built a majority support in this country and women’s movements in many other countries, so instead of being a novelty, we are now a majority. And we have achieved new laws, new phrases, new definitions, new consciousness in very important and life-saving ways.”

“However,” she went on, “there is still so much violence against women in the world. So violence against women is clearly not solved.”

When I asked what changes were still needed to move us closer to equality, Gloria pointed to three priorities: “Any statement of ownership of our own bodies, however that occurs in our individual lives or our community or our collective lives, is crucial. Equal pay would be the best economic stimulus this country could have, so any insistence on equal pay is crucial. And any redefinition of work to include caregiving work so that it also has an economic value, at least at replacement level, that’s crucial.”

For Gloria, equality had to be reflected not only in our laws and institutions, but in the realities of women’s everyday lives.

Progress Is Not Automatic

One of Gloria’s most urgent messages was also one of her most sobering. “Progress is not automatic,” she told me. “That’s what movements are for. It depends on what we do every day.”

Rights gained can be lost. Cultural progress can be followed by backlash. No generation can assume that the work is done.

And she continually reminded me that lasting change doesn’t simply come from the people at the top. “Change is like a house,” she told me. “It has to be built from the bottom up.”

That lesson feels painfully relevant today, when many of the fundamental rights Gloria spent her life fighting for have been rolled back or are under threat. Her message was not that progress was inevitable, but that progress was possible—and that each of us has a role in making it happen.

The scale of the world’s problems can make any individual feel powerless. I asked Gloria about that feeling more than once. Her advice was wonderfully simple: “Don’t worry about what you should do, do whatever you can.”

But she also emphasized that we shouldn’t try to do it alone. “Seek companions with shared values,” she told me. “If we’re isolated, we come to feel powerless when we’re not.”

As she told me on another occasion, she tried to “make some balance between what needs doing and what I can uniquely do.”

A life of activism doesn’t require doing everything. What matters is figuring out what we can do and finding others who care about the same things.

Gloria was 92 and still writing, organizing, connecting people and imagining what might come next.

Years ago, when I asked what continued to drive her after decades of activism, she talked about the excitement she found in the work itself. She told me, “It’s endlessly interesting to be organizing and hearing possible solutions or thinking of possible solutions and how to put efforts together.”

She brought that same spirit of curiosity to aging. Rather than treating aging as something to hide or fear, Gloria believed in embracing it. “It would help not to treat age as if it were any less of a pleasure than it was when we were six and saying, ‘I’m six and a half!,’ she said. “You know, we could be saying, ‘I’m fifty and a half’ and say it with joy. Each age is different and has different discoveries and pleasures.”

For Gloria, aging was part of the natural cycle of life, not a reason to retreat from it. That philosophy seems especially meaningful now. Gloria’s life itself became an argument against the idea that there is an expiration date on curiosity, contribution, reinvention or activism. She kept going because there was always more to discover, more to imagine, more to connect—and more to do.

Never Underestimate the Ripples of Change You Can Create

Of all the things Gloria told me over the years, there is one image I keep returning to today: “Whatever small change we make will be like a pebble in a pond. It will reverberate outward.”

And then, in characteristic Gloria fashion, she added: “It will also be fun. It’s important to understand what joy there is.”

“We’re meant to be active and contribute to the world,” she told me.

Gloria knew that taking action isn’t always easy. But she also understood the cost of not acting. “I’ve learned one thing: no matter how hard it is to do it, it’s harder not to do it. What’s the alternative? Just sitting there and wondering, ‘Oh, if I had just done this, maybe...’ Then you’re stuck with wondering, ‘What if I had said...? What if I had done...?’”

Few people have demonstrated those words more powerfully than Gloria herself. The ripples of her life are everywhere—in the rights she helped advance, the movements she helped build, the people she mentored and connected, the consciousness she helped awaken and the generations of activists who will continue the work to which she devoted herself.

The ripples she created in my own life are immeasurable. I will do everything in my power to continue lifting up her words and carrying forward her legacy.

But perhaps that is something all of us who were touched by Gloria—whether personally or through her work—can do. We can listen. We can connect. We can question hierarchy. We can recognize our own value and the value of others. We can imagine what could be different. We can create our own hope. We can do whatever we can.

And then we can trust, as Gloria did, that those actions, however small they may seem, will reverberate outward. Gloria’s life was a pebble in the pond whose ripples changed the world. They will continue for generations.

To learn more about Gloria Steinem’s life and work, visit her official website and Gloria’s Foundation .