I am Female, Watch me Roar

A conversation with my therapist formed the seed for this post. The words she told me will forever live within me, and the gratitude I have for her will burn bright for the rest of my life. She said, “when you were brave, you didn’t just stand up for yourself. You stood up for all the women that came before you — your mother, her mother, and everyone before that.”

When we broke a cycle in some way, the energy from everyone that come before you stands with you, and the energy you create through your courage propels others forward. This is for the women in my life, my mother most of all, who made me the person I am today. We are so much more than the labels society layers on us.

This post is female. I doubt anything I write here will be relatable to a man, but it might. Who knows? I don’t. But the person I’m writing to and for as I put these words down looks and feels a lot like me and I’m feeling quite female right now.

Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, I can begin.

Life changes many times over, over a lifetime. I’m sure we realize it at some level as we meander into adulthood, to some extent at least. But it never hits you till you’re a few decades in. I’m talking well into your thirties, grazing close to your forties that sort of thing. Jeez, did I just feel a drop of sweat trickle down my forehead? Metaphorical, of course, considering it’s 6 degrees outside.

The thing is the predominantly feminine energy that I got from my friends and circle around me was something I took for granted for a long time. I know this now because it’s consistently depleted over the past decade. Because that’s what society trains us to do. We walk into our teenage years popped up on raging hormones and (in my case) MTv, and a lot of early adulthood seems to be geared towards landing ‘the ideal mate’. Everything prods you in that general direction…movies, family, friends, culture in all its generous expanse takes you closer towards the perfect dream and at the heart of it is a man and the family you will build with him.

Maybe I don’t speak about everyone, but this is how it was for my generation and I when we were ‘growing up’. Also, does that ever happen?

Your friend circle gets smaller. The workplaces you join have fewer humans belonging to your age cohort, and overall relatability circles get smaller and smaller while your dark circles get bigger. Add to this a new country or culture (like I did, coz I’m a sucker for punishment) and you have an even smaller frame to work with.

You see how the overlapping spaces of that Venn diagram are becoming close to non-existent till you’re nothing but a floating orb without any common touchpoints. Those trippy screensavers from the early 2000s comes to mind, the ones with those floating colorful balls that bounced off of each other, grazing the edges of the screen. Never completely merging into one another, never leaving that confined space. Just floating. Realizing that I deeply relate to the floating orb in a screensaver from two decades back is a grounding feeling.

I think middle adulthood feels a bit like that. Ugh, does that sound too depressing?

It’s not, actually. It is just what it is.

This post isn’t about how to make those colorful orbs meet each other. Nor is it about breaking free from the shackles of the hypothetical screen (scary parallel to life) and burst out into the wild unknown. Because when you’ve been around as long as I have, you know that you only break out of one bubble space to enter another. I don’t have the magic fix here, I’m right at the center of this experience and (trying to) figure it out myself. Sorry, younger reader: I don’t have anything for you that will help you skip the lonely bubble phase.

What I do know from experience is that similar women that have lived a few decades longer than I have didn’t have it as good as I do. And that is a comforting thought. Here of course I only speak of a small fraction of the female community, especially in a country like mine. I come from, and speak from, a place of privilege. A privilege I am very aware of and one that I don’t take lightly.

The part of the bullshit that I want to call out though, is the search for the ideal mate part. Yes, it’s great to finally meet someone to share the chaos that is our human existence. But there’s so much more to the female life experience than just that. I say this because I see so many young women turn themselves into an idea or a concept of what they ‘should’ look or sound or think like that is largely templatized. It is what media, the marketing department of capitalism, sells to you. I’ve seen so many of my peers being twisted into shallow, uninteresting versions of themselves. I’ve been there myself many times over (guilty as charged). Smart, funny, competent women who get trained to be silly, not to be confused with goofy, plastic versions of themselves. Just to be chosen by a mate.

I won’t lie - more often than not, they are. And that’s where it ends.

Except, that’s not what life is, is it? It’s where the movies want you to believe life ends - when the pretty girl gets the smart guy and they get married. In real life, that’s where it begins. All the pretty and fun and exciting things they tell you are also true, but as with the other things, it’s also marketed really well. A bit too well, if I may add.

What isn’t marketed, or spoken about, is the female energy we gather along the way. And how different it is from masculine energy. Because women are a community, they are like the earth - they nurture and share and grow and give. And depleting that energy source from your life is one of the saddest realities that no one ever tells you about.

This post has gone on for too long and the robot vaccum cleaner is noisy so I’m going to stop.

TLDR: Keep your feminine energy recharged all through life. We need it more than we think we will.