Happy International Women’s Day!

Since the beginning of my adolescence, I have been seeking for truth, contradictions and new questions on femininity and womanhood. I sought for the mother of our pain, the father of our fears, the teenaged sister of our rebellion, the infant of our courage, and the soil upon which the home of our anger is built. Through the voices of many great women and feminists I have discovered my own, and thus was carved the tombstone for my silence.

A few weeks back, a friend of mine said: “There’s no need to be so ruthless about it anymore. Women have choices.” I began to explain how layered, conditional and limited our choices are. But I’d wondered then: How many of us truly believe that we have won this battle? The more I read, the more I realise how much of our lives are still regulated by and measured against patriarchal ideals.

My expectations of how things should be have been moulded largely by Western discourse, and though it has given me immense hope it has also created a great dissonance within me. I’m dissatisfied by how things are on our side of the universe, frustrated at the lack of progress and inconsolable over how little I am compared to the giant in the clouds named Patriarchy.

At the same time, I’m becoming more conscious of the paradoxes that arise with each step we take. I’m confronting the contradictions between what I’ve read and what I’ve experienced, though often I feel I might never reconcile the disparity. But I am not powerless. None of us are. Between two countries, I‘ve listened to women at the intersections of race, religion and sexual orientation: Their trials in navigating the concept of femininity in their community; in assessing their relationships and emotional labor; and their crusade towards their own vision. They have been sources of a great many truths, and a great many new questions.

I am unlearning two decades of misogyny; gazing inward to acknowledge my privileges and defeat my silences. I am seeking in my friends and sisters a way to build a bridge across the many junctures of injustice. For It is through your eyes that I have begun to see clearly. I see a blinding light. With you beside me, I‘ll never doubt my sight.