As a woman, I often dealt with commonly tackled topics like identity, female friendships, love, and more. All of these would grow to shape me into the person I am today. But to know that, I had to reflect on three aspects of my life that I overlooked and had more of an impact than I liked to admit.
To start off, as a young girl, I was a slow learner, and maybe to the shock of some who don’t know me well, I really hated the hobbies I love today. Like a lot. In school, I often found myself struggling with reading, and I especially despised writing simply because I had never really learned to write well until I was ten.
That was the year I met Miss Anita, who was my private reading and writing tutor throughout middle school and most of high school. We didn’t get off to a great start, initially in the first two months of our relationship. I absolutely despised the writing sessions we had, and I often took out my hatred for writing on her. But it is our evolution that I came to appreciate, and that is forever branded in my memory.
As my writing improved under Anita’s , I came to view her as a mentor and a teacher. She was nurturing, patient, and passionate about teaching; she always enjoyed it with such love that I had rarely seen in a lot of other teachers that I knew.
Anita taught me how to outline, to write a draft, and to revise an essay—aspects of writing that I would never have understood had I learned from her firsthand experience. She was the foundation for my writing, and I was inspired to take it up because of that.
Even today, even though we have both gone onto our different paths, Anita still remains an inspiration to me for my writing and reading today.
It was a truth universally acknowledged that going into Women’s History Month, I was evaluating my relationship with reading.
In my junior and senior years of high school, I was in love with romantic era novels, especially those written by women; many of them eventually grew to feel like my friends. My favorite, to this day, is my hero, Jane Austen. Her novels, which focus on satire and romantic comedy, were like a breath of fresh air for me.
Whether that was enjoying the stories of her heroines or cleverly mocking the societal norms of her society, I had grown to love her style of writing and how empowering they were. Austen, despite her conservative viewpoints, was empowering in that her characters were written in a way that was novel in her time; each of them had their own personality, character, values, and conflicts.
I related to them in a similar way, and I was amazed by how Austen not only created strong female characters, but also humanized them to the audience. I grew to love characters like the quick-witted Elizabeth, the naive Catherine, the prideful Emma, or even the sensible but practical Elinor. Each of them felt like an aspect of my own personality, and I allowed myself to be more feminine and vulnerable because of this.
However, now in my first year at college, I realized that I had been overlooking the impact of female friendships that I had built throughout the years. From my childhood best friends to my high school friends, and now my college friends at Her Campus SJSU, all of these women make up a part of me. Although I have a different dynamic with each of my friends, I found that our common identity as women was something we all shared in common.
Especially going into college, I was uncomfortable with many things. Many of the female friendships I had outside of my close friends were not nearly as tight-knit, and we often shared different interests.
However, I received more lessons than I would’ve initially liked to give them credit for. I was able to build closer relationships not just because of our proximity, but we were also brought together, whether that was a shared interest, belief, or even value we had.
Though we were all different, in the end, we each found something in each other that made us who we are as women now. Chatting over our similarities and differences, our dreams, passions, or just small talk made up for deeper and closer relationships that I will never really forget for the years that will come. Reflecting on this, no matter how close we were, there was always a sense of closeness that came with building female friendships.
Looking back on this with a slightly older perspective now and having the chance to celebrate the women that have influenced me going into March, I feel warm.
I feel safer in my own skin. I feel happy being able to celebrate the ones around me. Most of all, I can be the woman I was always meant to be.
How do you celebrate Women’s History Month? Let us know @HerCampusSJSU.