Once upon a time, there was an incredibly submissive girl. The kind of person who couldn’t hold eye contact with someone for more than a minute, let alone stare directly at them. I would’ve rather buried my head in the sand like an ostrich than try to function like a normal woman living in the 21st century. So, what changed? How did I suddenly develop the kind of character women are supposedly expected to have? Well, this is part of my story. One day, less than two years ago, I got out of bed and went through the usual routine every single mother knows by heart. Bathroom, shower, getting my little girl ready for school, making sure everything was in order. Nothing unusual had happened.
I dropped my daughter off at elementary school and came back home. But somewhere in that silence, I realized the emptiness I had carried my entire life had become unbearable. I couldn’t tolerate it for one more day, not even one more minute. And just like that, almost like lightning striking me in the chest, I felt something real for the first time in years: the genuine desire to change. The truth is, I had already been thinking about it for a long time. I knew perfectly well which parts of myself were destroying me. Submission. Weakness. Fear. And above all, this permanent sadness and dissatisfaction that followed me everywhere no matter what I did. Things like this don’t happen out of nowhere. I didn’t wake up one day and randomly decide to reinvent myself. No. I was exhausted. Completely exhausted. And that exhaustion, combined with the loneliness I was drowning in, finally made everything overflow.
Little by little, I started forcing myself to look people in the eyes instead of staring at the floor or finding random distractions to avoid human contact. My body would shake. I had horrible panic attacks. I would sweat like I was about to walk into the fight of my life, except the fight was for my own existence. Deep down, I wanted to break the cycle every woman in my family seemed trapped inside, even the ones who clearly hated it themselves. By then, I was already a mother, and the idea of my daughter growing up like me terrified me. That extreme fear of my own shadow. That inability to actually live my life.
Whether I made mistakes or not didn’t even matter anymore, because the way I constantly diminished myself was eating me alive. I cried for hours because of it. And more than anything in this world, I didn’t want my daughter to normalize that behavior through my example, whether intentionally or not. I won’t lie to you, though. I relapsed many times. In the world women like me grow up in, compassion and empathy are usually in short supply. Judgment and pressure are far more common. Some of my friends, who had lived through experiences similar to mine, actually encouraged me to stay the way I used to be. And honestly, that scared me even more.
But eventually, through stubborn consistency, therapy, and a strength I honestly didn’t know I had, everything started changing. Now I look back at the girl I used to be and I swear I barely recognize her. Women, generally speaking, are often raised inside limitations tied to gender expectations, and sometimes we end up hurting ourselves more than anyone else ever could. We can be unbelievably cruel to our own gender. Should it be that way? Absolutely not. Should women be forced into one specific version of femininity? From my perspective, the only thing we should truly be is authentic and whole. Once you find peace with those two things, you become almost impossible to break.
