I love being a multidimensional woman. I love not fitting in a box, not being what people perceive me as. There is a different feeling of freedom that comes with being a woman who does not make sense to people.
I think being a woman means being handed a box as a little girl and being taught how to fit yourself into it — and especially, how to stay there, conformed. You play with dolls, play house and are conditioned to only like “girly things.”
You subtly learn what is expected of you and what is not. Then you grow up and realize you want to be more than who you thought you were allowed to be.
Suddenly, you don’t fit in your box anymore, so you start cutting parts of yourself to squeeze back inside.
Choice becomes a constant in your life. Do you make yourself miserable, or choose happiness and risk being criticized for it? Do you choose freedom, or love, at the expense of your identity? Why does being a woman so often feel like choosing one part of yourself over another?
Contradictions exist in everyone because we are human. We are not meant to remain one thing. We evolve, grow and change. Yet contradictions in women are often seen as reckless and as things that need explaining.
It took me a long time to reconcile my own clashing personalities — or at least what others deemed as such. How could I be the only Muslim woman wearing a headscarf in my swimming class? How could I be among the only two women in my boxing class?
How could I be someone who everyone thought was sweet yet have boundaries? How could I be a good daughter and do what made me happy?
Culture and tradition have an evil way of masking expectations as virtues. You learn that being loved means being easy to accommodate, and being good means being agreeable. Eventually, you become so accustomed to being perceived that you begin perceiving yourself.
For a long time, it felt like there was a theatre in my head, an audience watching while I performed. Every decision seemed to contradict another part of who I was. But who was I performing for? Who was I disappointing, if not myself, by denying myself freedom simply because someone might perceive me differently?
There is nobody to perform for. No audience. Nothing to earn — not respect, not approval, not love.
When I think of all the amazing women around me, including my mother, I see the millions of different things they have dared to be throughout their lives despite everything. They are soft and stubborn, loving and independent, traditional and unconventional, sometimes all at once. I want to be like other women.
Maybe that is also why girls have always loved Barbie. “There is so much more to me,” she sings in Barbie: A Fairy Secret. And there always was.
Barbie could be strong and still be soft. She could be unapologetically feminine without femininity being the entirety of who she was. She could fall in love and have a boyfriend without her story beginning and ending with him. She could be a princess in one story and something completely different in the next, and none of those versions made the others less real.
Maybe we were never supposed to choose. Maybe being a woman is being allowed to be all of it.
