I Am Woman

This International Women’s Day, I find myself asking, what is a woman? What does it mean to be a woman? As a woman, who am I?

My newsfeed has been filled lately with discussion about what a “real” woman must be. Raised in a conservative Evangelical Christian subculture, I accepted quite young that truth was, literally, handed down to us from on high. The definitions of all things, I trusted, could be found within the God-breathed holy scriptures. 

The uncompromising, authoritarian version of God I once feared no longer has my unquestioning allegiance. Furthermore, I have begun to deeply doubt the clarity of stark borders between various categories taught me by religious leaders I once respected. I was told, as we do to children, who other people believed I should be. I never understood I needed no permission to think on my own, to discover the person I am. I watched and waited, hoping to find my someone, the man (because it had to be a man) who would tell me he saw me, he loved me, it was okay simply to be myself. I thought I’d found him when I married Adam. I thought he would be the one who’d set me free. Rather, I found myself caught in yet another cage, questioning my own perceptions of what I thought I knew to be true,

Now, I have abandoned my former life’s mission—to fit myself into someone else’s interpretation of who it is I ought to be. Instead, I am determined to test and try and push myself to find my own freedom, set my own boundaries. I will take up my space, not as described by what is allotted to me, but that expanse in which my spirit recognizes home. I must, I am finally starting to comprehend, live life in all of myself, as the reality of who I am, or I have not lived life at all. I will no longer settle for a life half lived, nor a place called “my own” where I must curl round about myself in order to fit in.

Right at this moment, I don’t fully know who I am. I am not sure the extent of the space I will occupy. I haven’t yet found the right shape that fits the me inside. But, I am looking. I’m listening. I’m waiting, not on someone else to respond to me, but on my own intuitive wisdom to tap me on the shoulder and let me know I have found where I belong.

Today, I wish the best to all women: young women, old women, cis women, trans women, traditionally feminine women, women who do not conform to gender stereotypes, religious women, secular women, confident women, insecure women, and, especially, all the women-in-between who are finding and learning and growing and fighting our way into the spaces, building the places where we are free to be exactly the women we are and all we will become.

Conversation for this post hosted at facebook.com/ShamelessHonesty