I don’t know when it happened—when I stopped thinking of myself as a “woman” and started thinking of myself as just me. A person. A self. A soul trying to hold its edges against a world that keeps reaching for them.
Maybe the truth is this:
I never felt like a woman at all.
Not in the way the world defines it.
Not in the way history choreographs it.
Not in the way culture claims it.
I’ve only ever felt like myself—and somehow that has never been enough for anyone.
Because being “a woman” isn’t something you are. It’s something everyone else requires from you.
It’s a job description.
A performance.
A centuries-old assignment that no one asked if you wanted.
And once the world decides you’re a woman, the requests never stop.
Everybody and their dogs want something from you.
Affection. Softness. Patience. Warmth. Attention. Beauty. Understanding. Forgiveness. Access.
Entertainment.
Submission.
Endurance.
You can’t move through the world without someone tugging at your energy like it’s public property.
To keep your soul intact, you have to protect yourself from everything.
And that’s the part no one talks about:
The exhaustion of constant self-defense.
Not against violence—though that too—but against the slow drip of being consumed.
Men want something.
Society wants something.
Your family wants something.
Your image wants something.
Your safety wants something.
Your hormones want something.
Your survival instincts want something.
Even your silence wants something from you.
There is no neutral space.
Women live inside a perpetual demand.
And then the world has the audacity to call women “mysterious” as if mystery isn’t just what happens when a human being is too tired to explain herself for the millionth time.
The funniest part is that none of this was requested.
Women are the cosmic delivery no one ordered but everyone reorganized their entire lives around.
God really could’ve made us ornamental—quiet flowers in the corner to brighten the scenery.
But no.
He was feeling creative that day.
He gave women a mind that runs ten laps while men are still deciding which foot to stand on.
He gave women intuition, memory, emotional architecture, predictive analysis, and a built-in lie detector—then dropped her into a world not designed to accommodate any of it.
It’s wild when you think about it.
Before women showed up, everything was orderly.
Angels doing angel things.
Adam naming animals in alphabetical peace.
The universe following a clear, quiet schedule.
Then God said,
“Let me try something new.”
…and introduced the first ever multi-layered consciousness with beauty and intelligence in the same vessel.
Of course everything cracked.
Of course desires exploded.
Of course dominance systems formed.
Of course men centralized women as the one domain they could control and still feel powerful.
Women became the perfect contradiction:
the thing they desire,
the thing they fear,
the thing they want to dominate,
and the thing they cannot live without.
Not because women are weak.
But because women were the only beings men could dominate without cosmic consequences.
And so, women became the battleground for everyone’s needs.
Love me.
Calm me.
Forgive me.
Entertain me.
Carry me.
Soften me.
Validate me.
Don’t outsmart me.
Don’t outshine me.
Don’t outgrow me.
But also—never stop pouring into me.
Women had to shrink themselves into a shape men could handle.
Even in old stories and dramas, you can see it:
women weren’t simple—
they were strategically small.
Their real intelligence had nowhere to go, so it folded inward and sideways into emotional chess, domestic politics, sister-wife rivalry, and silent wars that men never even noticed.
When you deny a human being power outwardly, it reroutes itself internally.
Women didn’t fight men because men were the entertainment—
the only stimulation allowed.
So the war became horizontal, not vertical.
And still, beneath all of that, beneath every layer of expectation and performance, beneath every demand and label and burden…
…there is just you.
A person.
A self.
A soul.
Not wanting to be “a woman” doesn’t mean rejecting the body you’re in.
It means rejecting the script that was forced on it.
It means saying:
I don’t want the job.
I never applied for the job.
I just want to exist without being consumed.
It’s not confusion.
It’s clarity.
Maybe womanhood isn’t something you “feel.”
Maybe womanhood is the costume the world draped
over you.
And when you take it off, all that’s left is what you always were:
a human being who refuses to be harvested.
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