What is it like to be a woman?
To be a woman means tightening my shoulders every morning,
as if dressing in invisible armor,
as if I’m going to war—not to the kitchen.
And yet, that’s where the greatest battle takes place:
between what I feel and what I must,
between what I long for and what’s expected of me.
I carry a whole world on my shoulders,
and no one brings me flowers for it.
They told me my body was temptation,
but no one ever said it was also a sanctuary.
I was pulled by strings like a puppet
and taught to say “thank you” for attention.
To be a woman means I learned shame
before I ever learned poetry.
To hide when my period came,
when tears came,
when desire came.
To keep my legs tucked under the desk at school,
lest someone trip over me.
I feared men.
Priests.
My father, sometimes.
I feared looking in the mirror and liking what I saw.
I was taught to be small.
To not ask for too much.
To not be “too” anything.
Not too smart, not too pretty, not too outspoken, not too tired.
I grew up watching women cook with lumps in their throats,
and men who always sat at the table first.
I saw mothers who forgot their own names.
Women who made soup from nothing
and ordinary days out of near-death.
I told myself I’d be different.
And I wasn’t.
Not until motherhood hit me from behind like a thief.
I volunteered for five jobs, all for the same salary. Or for none.
And I realized that it’s not just about choices.
It’s about how crooked the world is built.
They labeled every wrinkle and every silence.
When I was gentle, I was seen as weak.
When I was firm, I was called hysterical.
I was “too sensitive,” “too intense,” “too tired,” “too much.”
No one ever asked me what hurts.
Or since when.
Or why I can’t sleep.
I raised children with fire in my veins
and a heart scattered between two hugs.
I made soup, dentist appointments, compromises.
I cried in the bathroom so no one would see.
I came out with puffy eyes and said, “I’m fine.”
I learned to get up on my own,
brush off my knees,
and keep going.
Always keep going.
To be a woman is to carry a constant longing for myself.
To suddenly remember how I laughed at 16
and what I dreamed of at 20.
To look at the girls around me and scream in my head:
“Don’t sell yourselves! Don’t go silent!
Don’t bury your dreams! Don’t let them walk all over you!”
To be a woman is to burn and be reborn a thousand times
in a single life.
To be autumn and spring in the same body.
To be war and shelter.
To take my voice back,
to say my name out loud,
to write down who I am in ink.
I am a woman.
And I no longer ask for permission to be.