Collectively, we girls decided to write about women this week. Which sounds like a good idea theoretically—until you sit down and try to write something honest. I realized pretty quickly I had no idea where to begin.
So, I avoided it.
I closed my laptop before I even really opened it.
I waited for something softer to come to me—something easier to say.
But nothing about this is easy.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think about growing up as a woman, let’s be honest, isn’t pretty. It isn’t empowering. It isn’t something you can package into a clean paragraph and feel good about.
It’s the feeling of being watched before you even understand what that means: Of being looked at, judged, and measured—constantly. Of learning (without anyone ever saying it out loud) that how you are seen will matter more than who you are.
And that sticks.
It gets into you early.
I don’t think I will ever fully understand why so much of being a woman is met with resistance. But I know what it does to you. It builds you under extreme pressure and teaches you how to shrink before it ever teaches you how to stand.
So yeah, I could sit here and write about the weight of it. That would be honest.
But I don’t want to stay there.
Because this isn’t just about what broke me; it’s about what I kept becoming regardless. And loving that – loving being a woman – did not come naturally to me.
It came from years of looking at other women and deciding they were everything I wasn’t. From comparing, dissecting, and diminishing myself until I felt smaller, quieter, and easier to accept. From learning how to be liked before I ever learned how to be real.
I taught myself how to be chosen.
And somewhere along the way, I started confusing being lusted with being loved. Not in an obvious way. No one sits you down and explains that part. It happens slowly. Maybe in the way attention starts to feel like safety. Or in the way a look, a compliment, or even a moment of desire can fill something in you that you don’t know how to fill on your own.
Lust was easier.
It didn’t ask me to be whole, it didn’t even ask me to be known – it just asked me to be enough, just for a moment.
And that felt like control. If I could be desired, I could be chosen. And if I were chosen, then maybe I wouldn’t have to face the quiet fear that I wasn’t enough without it. So, I became this version of myself that felt safer. Versions that got attention. Versions that got approval.
But never once did they feel like me.
Lust is quick; it burns fast. And when it’s over, you’re left sitting in the same body, with the same emptiness—except now it’s even louder.
And I kept going back to it anyway. Not because I didn’t know better, but because love felt harder.
Love meant being seen, fully.
Not just the parts that are easy to want—but the parts that are complicated, emotional, and unfinished. And I didn’t know how to let anyone see that without feeling like I was risking everything.
So, I chose moments over meaning.
Attention instead of intention.
And that choice—over and over again—cost me more than I ever want to admit.
There’s a specific kind of heartbreak that comes from abandoning yourself. It doesn’t look dramatic or even announce itself. It just quietly takes pieces of you until one day you look at your own reflection and don’t recognize who’s standing there.
I have been that girl, the one who waited to be chosen, the one who thought love meant becoming whatever someone else needed, and the one who confused validation for worth.
And I am tired of her. Not in a way that erases her—because she got me here.
But in a way that finally tells the truth about what she had to do to survive. Because I was never meant to be easy to consume. I was never meant to be quiet just to make other people comfortable. And I was never meant to shrink myself into something that could be held without question.
Women aren’t here to be digestible; we’re not here to exist in ways that make others (men specifically) feel powerful, comfortable, or in control. And honestly, I am done living like that isn’t true.
I am allowed to take up space, to be soft, to be emotional and unapologetic, and I am allowed to exist without explaining why.
I am allowed to be a woman in whatever way feels honest to me.
And maybe I don’t have everything figured out. Maybe I am still rebuilding pieces of myself that I once gave away too freely. Maybe I am only twenty, standing at the edge of a life I don’t fully understand yet.
But I know this: I am done asking for permission to be myself, I am done sanding down the parts of me that were never meant to be smooth, and I am done living a life that looks right but feels wrong.
Becoming yourself isn’t gentle, it’s uncomfortable, it’s lonely, and it will cost you, people.
But it’s the only thing that has ever felt real to me. And I would rather have something be real than have something only be wanted for a moment. Every single time.