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Being born is the simplest task one could possibly be assigned. There’s absolutely no role you have to perform; you are simply there, celebrated for your mere presence. Yet, one is always born into a society, and society comes with expectations. The moment a person is born, they are assigned a gender, the earliest and most prominent social construct. There are two genders that are socially accepted: male and female, a boy and a girl, a man and a woman. The earliest thing a girl learns is that one is more blessed than the other. The earliest thing a boy learns is just how much he can get away with.

Every girl has one memory, one memory etched deeply into her mind. There’s a certain way a girl is supposed to act, to eat, sleep, sit, work, and even breathe. As much as I wish it weren’t true, the list goes on. A defining part of being a girl is remembering, remembering the first time someone told you that you didn’t belong, not to your own home, not even to your parents. From the moment you were born, you were destined for a boy you didn’t know, for a family from whom you can’t even expect to be treated as one of their own. Or remembering the first time you realised that there’s a certain way “good girls” are supposed to look, and you’ll spend your whole life trying to mirror it.

The first out-of-body experience, and never quite feeling in your body again, comes when you realise that pretty isn’t pretty. You are handed a literal handbook on how you’re supposed to look, and every morning and night, you spend hours perfecting that image. Yet no mirror, no camera, no picture will ever give you the satisfaction of just being beautiful, because pretty isn’t pretty. You find everything you dislike about yourself, and you fix it. You become almost unrecognisable, yet the mirror still recognises you. It screams at you for another blemish, another flaw. You finally realise there’s not enough fixing you can do, because as long as it’s you, you will always find something to hate.

The challenge of being born a woman is that you are taught to chase expectations that can never be met. There will always be something you are not good enough for or at; that’s just the law of society. Lawbreakers are criminals; good girls aren’t criminals. They are obedient, timid, and meek, and they pass on the baton because the cycle never breaks.

Yet, the strength of being a woman lies in seeing this truth and daring to question it. We may spend half our lives trying to be good and the other half wondering if we ever were — but in between, we also learn to rise, to redefine what “good” means, and to find beauty and worth on our own terms.