On the morning of my thirteenth birthday, a voice whispered a list of things a real woman should be to me.
“A woman should be lovely and smile unwillingly. A woman should look like a deity bestowing her grace on Earth. A woman should be afraid of the wretched reflection in the mirror.”
I don’t fit into the first and the second, so I only crossed off the last one on the list.
An unrelenting nightmare it was each time I look at my own shadow and it wasn’t shaped the same way as any other woman. Without realizing it, I did everything to escape from being hunted by the light and its desire: to lay my shadow bare and tear it to shreds.
Under the sun I am nothing but a ghostly figure detached from society. My fear of being seen paralyzes me into silence¹. There are times when I sat on the edge of my bed and thought, “Have I ceased to exist?”
But it’s fine. I’d rather not exist than to be perceived.
Isn’t it agonizing, how a woman needs to look a certain way to be loved? Being a woman is a constant reminder that I could never become a God. How nice it is, to be loved without being seen?
Growing up as a woman turns out to be excruciating. Back then, I couldn’t comprehend what the voice meant. But as I grew up to be a woman, what it wanted to say got clearer in my head: A real woman should be ashamed of her own skin.
The voice is right, I thought. I began to refuse the destiny and fate written by heaven. Clawing onto my own skin in hope of erasing all the shame it brought me. I hated being a woman. If I weren’t one, I wouldn’t have to feel this way. Praying one day all the flames I felt within turn me to ashes and I could rise like Phoenix and be reborn, as something, something so much more.
Without all the flaws and shame.
With all the beauty and grace.
But then if I were born-again, how do I recognize myself without all my flaws and scars? How could I leave my body / my skin / the pieces of myself I was born with? In a world where a woman’s worth is determined by their body, am I simply not allowed to exist if I am not bathed in beauty?
Years after my thirteenth birthday, I learned what the voice didn’t teach me on how to be a real woman: Women don’t have to be anything to be called a real woman. They’re free to be everything they wanted to be and free to not be everything they don’t want to be.
How you look and act will never make you less of a woman.
So this time, I want to learn how to put those shame inside a box and lock it away. I want to embrace the wretched image of my reflection in the mirror. To find acceptance, between the hatred and love of being a woman.
N, July 2023.
¹ From Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith.
