I am a woman and yet I am not.
There is something shameful about being a woman. A feeling of bashfulness but worse, the need to cover myself up from the insidious eyes of the world. I don't deserve to be seen. They don't deserve to see me.
There is something exhilarating to it, too. The home I find in other girls like me, the solidarity shared in a knowing glance when a man speaks about things he knows nothing about with the confidence of a thousand experts, the knowledge that, no matter how much we may dislike each other as people, we will not hesitate to jump to the other's defence should she be in danger.
Being a woman is a wonderful, terrible thing to be in a world designed by men. It's pain and suffering, of the kind that makes your tongue spill blood in your mouth from how hard you have to bite it when a man talks over you, his whisper always louder than your shout. It's righteous anger, a simmering, bubbling rage boiling right beneath the skin every time you get trampled by those around you, put down and made to remember your place.
There are many types of women in the world, each one separated by her own brand of experiences accumulated over the years, divided by age, race, gender identity, sexuality, religious beliefs, nationality. But the world tries to compress them into one, unanimous entity, which boils down to our oppression and the endless war we've been waging against what feels like nature itself, at times, since humans lit the first fire in a dank cave somewhere, for the right to exist and not be condemned over it.
I wasn't yet born, still swimming in my mother's belly, contently unaware of the horror waiting for me outside her protective walls of human flesh and sinew, when the world already decided what I was going to be. I would have long hair - I cut it all off more than once at the first glimpse of independence - and a small waist - I've been overweight ever since I can remember - and I would live to serve men. First my father, then my brother, then a boyfriend and future husband, then my sons and their sons after them, and every single man who'll feel entitled to my labour.
I got out. I escaped that bleak future dictated by everyone around me. But not all women do.
A woman is as valuable as her labour. She is a mother first, then a woman, then a human being at last - more often than not, she doesn't reach the last stage. She is a sister and a daughter, a wife and an aunt. Her worth is appreciated by the men in direct relationship with her, and only because of that relationship. She is never herself, her own person with a will and a strength, independent from everyone else.
My whole life, I've been running away from what being a woman means, avoiding to put that label on myself for fear of sentencing myself to a lifetime of servitude. I don't think I'm quite done hiding, maybe I never will be, and I feel like I owe an apology to all the strong, brave women who go out into the world every day and face it as nothing more and nothing less than simply themselves. And perhaps, one day, I won't have to say, "being a woman is a terrible thing," and mean it.
But today is not that day.
