Being A Woman

We live in a time where the mold of "what a woman should be" is being shattered every day but still as a woman I'm often expected to be either strong or soft, ambitious or nurturing, quiet or loud. But to me, being a woman is the beauty of being all of them at once. I am not defined by expectations, but by the courage it takes to show up - again and again. 

There was this one incident in my school where we were asked to do a soft skill assignment and one of my friends had drawn a very beautiful picture and wrote an amazing poem about women empowerment / feminism which we displayed on the pin board outside class. And later that day we were asked to take that down and put up a different poster that was not even half as good. The only thing they could've found wrong in that poster is how a woman shouldn't blindly follow everything she's asked to.

On a different occasion, our school invited a guest speaker - a very well known person (man) for mother’s day celebration. And at first he was saying how great our mother’s are and how all our mom’s sacrificed so much for us - it was fine untill he went on to how a woman’s life is complete only through motherhood and how a woman’s sacrifices is what brings her respect and how women should focus on motherhood as that is what keeps the society strong blah blah ..He indirectly (not so indirectly) fed us the idea that motherhood is the only purpose of women.

And a whole lot of small instances where they use the phrase “You are a girl and you speak like this?” “You are a girl and you do this?”  “girls are like this“ and especially during sports hours , they only pay attention to the kho - kho team as they believe “girls are good in only that” and barely pay any attention to the volleyball or basketball teams. 

The amount of suppressing ideas imposed on us in the name of tradition and discipline is insane. And the worst part is they finish each sentence with “its for your own good”. 

And through all that I've seen, I've realised as a woman, the freedom you have is the freedom you’ve been given and not the freedom you own. So I have no choice left but to work hard till I have my own Freedom. 

Written By Amreen