Woman: not quite what you think she should be and not quite the societal branding of who she’s been told she is, but she carries it all with her nonetheless. She is a flower that can bare teeth and the quiet violence of a shedding of skin. Like Anaïs Nin walking into the fire, and Eartha Kitt falling in love with herself first. She is the exiled yellow iris of Circe that does not look away in times of defeat. She can be the warmth, the embrace and the kiss that makes it better. The mender, stitcher, healer; a carrying on and a sun. She takes the arrows aimed at her and builds a home, for better or worse. She may be what the world asks of her and more, or not at all, but she will define it for herself. She is both and all and none of the above; the vulnerability and the wrath; the honey and the sting; you and me.
There have been times when I’ve been enough, not enough or just too much. I could either be too much woman or not enough woman: too observant, too in my head, too attached; not enough fun, not enough novelty, not enough skin. But my amicability and timidity, well, that could be just right. I could be as agreeable as I’ve been taught to be or as feral as I’ve been scolded for, and I couldn’t forgive myself for being either. We’ve been told how to play the role: Be delectable. Be convenient. Be malleable. If you speak up, there’s no entryway back to your femininity. Using your voice and the density of your refusal is a one-way ticket out of your softness and my fantasy of you. Pick one. Give up this part of you to take with you the other. An “everything” that is seemingly never enough.
I recall girlhood, just before the gloom, doom and achiness of it all. I was proud of my art projects, fearless when playing sports and free within my self-expression. There lies the fleeting era as a young girl before you begin to notice the world noticing you; before I found myself contracting willingly or romanticizing the idea of wanting to be someone else. Even then, when I began to fathom the role that I was expected to uphold, all of the “me” that I was shoving and tucking inward would, inevitably, begin to ooze out. Like the things that a girl “shouldn’t” be: unbrushed hair, rough skin and the inability to bow out with grace. Or the capabilities that a girl “should” possess, like the inability to bow out at all. Yes, women are well versed in enduring when we shouldn’t have to. We survive, swallow and house the gnawing. But we also start anew, resurge and build upon. Time has shown me that my true autonomy and silent rebellion as a woman begins again and again with the internal triumph of remembering myself. The reclaiming of my experience in womanhood is as much of an undoing as it is a development. It is an undoing of all the pieces that I allowed myself to be convinced to chip away at.
Womanhood, for far too long, was tainted by the twisted value of how thoroughly women could disregard themselves. We continue to disrupt that stigma by either denying to conform to what is expected of us or by redefining our assigned archetype, the bounds of this pivoting from one day to the next. To me, womanhood is the empowerment to tell the truth about ourselves. It begins with the solitude of our identity. It is the tenacity to keep our instincts loud within ourselves. We rebel by reclaiming these quintessential qualities and carving out new territory for them by our own invention. We rebel within the liberation to be jagged and the desire to remain soft despite it all, secure in both our tenderness and edges. Or maybe it all comes down to a refusal to answer a margining question altogether. Because to only exist outside the box the world has put me in—has put women in—is a box in and of itself.
There are so many ways to be a woman. As long as they are all ours, we cannot lose. As I reflect on what it means to be one of the many varying identities of the modern woman, I remember that she has been there all along throughout history, society branding her with labels made up of lead—each one heavier than the last. Our own contemporary voice is, in actuality, a collective of the women that have come before us. We all represent a diverse sisterhood connected by an array of experiences, backgrounds and over-comings whose stories give way to an unsinkable and perennial legacy. Wails and exhales and “no’s.” Woman. Yes, to me, she is the ultimate rebel.
