Imagine waking up and your mind starts running before the day has even begun. Going out to meet friends? This starts from the moment you decide to go, with which ride hailing app to take, how you are going to protect yourself, whether you need to cover up, and once you are in the car you stay on the phone, vigilant about everything outside while a fight goes on inside you. This is an average day of a woman trying to live, or maybe just trying to survive. Now imagine that you have done everything. You have studied, you have built yourself, you have earned what you can, and you are still told that you are nothing until you have a man by your side. This is what women go through, and I think every woman, not only in a South Asian society, knows some version of it. We do not h*te being women, even though so much around us pushes us to make sacrifices simply because we are women. I love being a woman, because my idea of a woman does not come from what this society has given me but from Islam, which came when women were treated like objects and gave them the dignity to make decisions, stand firm in what they believed, fight in battles and work. Tbh, I picked South Asia because of how I have seen this society treat women, where there is a big difference between being of service and being made a servant, or being married because you need to rather than because you found the right person. I am the eldest and the only girl with three brothers, and while we have the same parents, trust me when I say we do not have the same parents, because everything changed in how we were raised the moment it was about a girl. Even in a privileged household like mine, building yourself becomes a constant effort to prove something you do not need to prove, and ambitious women know that we do not share our sorrows or failures because we do not want our parents to feel burdened, and think about what that does to a hyper independent mind, where even asking for help feels too big to say. I am not against marriage, but the mindset that comes with being told you are nothing without a man destroys women. You spend your whole life insecure, you finally accept yourself, and then the culture reduces you to a commodity again, hopping from one family to another trying to impress, and why do we need to impress? Why? It's weird how we women grow up building an impenetrable shield around us that makes us look strong, when in reality all we want is to give in and have someone we can trust. We want to be able to trust our parents with our choices, but this society has made them so scared of a daughter "ruining" their lives that they often forget to raise men not as "how not to be a woman" but as "how to be a man." Honestly, as a 29 year old I am finding it so hard to make my mother realize, or even see, what I am building and how important it is to me, because at the end it comes down to fear, fear of losing "my years" and fear of ending up with someone bad. So if you are a woman going through this, girl, I feel you, because I am building alone too, and I keep asking why marriage cannot be something you build yourself, finding the right person along the way, and why it is a default that if you are not married by 32 or 33 you will end up with someone really bad. Just know that in all of this, trying not to hurt others, trying to build, trying to live, please don't lose connection with yourself, because it is you with you when you wake up and when you go to sleep, even if you are married. I hope this reaches women who feel alone, and I hope it reaches men too, so that instead of thinking that women cry or are emotional, you sit with how you would feel after earning everything you can and loving the people around you, and then being told at a certain age that you have no worth until there is another person with you. You may not feel exactly what we feel, but you may learn to be kind. Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rgGQgJDlHAM?si=AHCo9uJRM8dxhbGn
