You will want to be a woman.

The wound is the place where light enters you, in other words – when you’re at your lowest, that’s your best place to strive. As they say, the good thing about hitting rock bottom is that you can only go up from there.

I have to start on a good note, no, in fact, I needed to start on a good and positive note. This is one is for you:

Are you afraid to leave your house every day?

Do you constantly live with the fear of what you’re going to be a victim of today? Rape, murder, racism, or just being beaten for simply not being interested in a man?

Are you afraid to walk alone even in the most public places?

Do you wonder when the people closest to you will one day turn on you and violate you or even worse?

Do you have to worry about what you wear?

Honestly, there’s a lot of questions I could ask you, but it would never end, but if you answered yes to most of these questions then that’s what it means to be a women today, or even worse a woman of colour.

We are too restricted by binaries and dichotomies in this world – most of which only women fall victim to.

But, as I stated my need to start on a good and positive point, I am going to continue that way.

We are currently facing a pandemic and leaders in certain countries are brutalising its members. We are being killed for being black. Crime still continues to prevail. Most people in this world are probably only facing one of these issues, but if you are a woman in this world, you are facing it all.

And yet, we continue to take up space.

We recreate stories that retell our experiences of abuse that you – the man, has put us through but also find entertainment in. These stories become the source of our greatness, our muse, our inspiration. These stories win us Grammys.

Condoms are free yet our backward thinking, narrow minded world refuses to apply the same rules for sanitary products. Young girls need to miss a week of school every month because of their womanhood. The same womanhood you – as the man, find pleasure in at our expense. And yet, we continue to get distinctions and become the Head Girls of our school.

‘Pink Tax’, a term used to define the phenomenon that makes women’s products more expensive than men’s. Same product, same function, different prices – the woman’s is more expensive. We have to pay for these more expensive products with the low salary we get from doing the same job the man is doing. And yet, we continue to purchase these products and we look good doing it.

‘Beauty’ – a social rule of acceptance? “Not pretty? Don’t worry, we’ll help you with that”. “Here, here’s some anti-aging cream”. Have you ever seen a man as the face of an anti-aging cream marketing campaign? No. Why? Because somehow women are expected to defy the rules of science by not growing, just to be accepted into society. And yet we continue to live, and be happy without this approval.

Anything the man can do; the woman can do better. She does while she’s bleeding, she does it with a lesser salary, she does it carrying another human being inside her. She does it through the pain of it all. You violate her today and tomorrow she wakes up and she aces that presentation.

The theory of evolution stresses the survival of the fittest. Those beings that can adapt to their surroundings and become stronger because of them. We continue through it all, this world that has been created for us. If there’s anything this should teach you is that, women are stronger than the man. By the time we are done, every man in this world will want to be a woman. WOMAN is an identity that matters. Do not define yourself by what you have been through but by what that experience has taught you. You are not a victim; you are a survivor. You survived and because of that natural selection, you rule this world. So be a woman because the man could never survive what you have been through. Be the woman because the woman has defeated the man. Be the woman because the man has been annihilated by the world.

Let the light enter those wounds and bring out a stronger version of you because that is what it means to be a woman. Not what you have been through but the you that was born out that experience.