What kind of woman are you?

“Who do you want to be when you grow up?”

The age old question many of us were asked and are still asked.

How did you answer then and how would you answer now?

Then, it was probably about wanting to be a doctor, a lawyer, teacher, pilot and a host of many other things.

But this wasn’t the full story.

There was the underlying expectation of being someone ‘meaningful‘, of doing something that will be celebrated and of not trying to be too different.

The full story includes some level of impersonation, loss of identity, jealousy, envy and a host of other character expectations.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to do a few things(be a Doctor, police officer ? etc) but didn’t want to be like anyone.

It’s funny thinking about it now but for some reason, I was happy and comfortable with who I was.

I was so playful and vibrant, always starting up conversations with random people and allowed my curiosity bubble through.

Perhaps, a few of us were like this as kids.

We were still free from the world’s standards and judgment but as the years flew by so did some of that esteem and assurance.

We may have realised that the individuality that had been celebrated when we were young was no longer expected as we grew older.

There was the need to conform

These led to questions, advice, and well meaning suggestions that only succeeded at chipping away the things we held dear and dimming the spark our smiles and laughter.

And of course, comparisons became the field of the day. It became a case of

“why can’t you be like ‘this’ or that girl’. ‘Why are you always different’. Why are you…

You can probably fill in the blanks.

Yes, they may have meant well, but I soon realised that trying to be who people want us to be is never the answer.

Like anything that is not true, or original and borne from a lack of understanding, it was never enough. The strings of people’s desires and expectations often pulled us in so many directions that we were left stretched thin and bleeding.

Then again, it would be unfair to heap all that blame on the named and nameless faces of our childhood. In my case, I knew they had their part to play but I remained the star act.

I too decided to change. I too started focusing on others – how they looked, what they did and how they did it.

I was caught in the unsightly web of teenage angst, and the reasons were obvious. My change hadn’t gone as planned. I was still lava and not the butterfly I was expecting.

Around me were budding butterflies and I was not happy about it.

Unknown to me, the seeds of envy and of not being good enough were being sown and it would take years to uproot these dangerous weeds.

Perhaps this little history has you thinking about your life and wondering where it all went wrong.

I share these stories because I have seen some troubling patterns in the lives of many women I know.

We are often not free with each other.

Perhaps, this could be as a result of an imperceptible friction amongst us. Perhaps, we look at the next woman as an opponent not a comrade.

The scary thing is that this often leads us down a path of envy, jealousy, arrogance, superiority complex and heaping pride.

The other day, I was telling a friend that I noticed that women often scrutinize other women more than men do.

When a woman walks into a room, she is often subjected to a full-body examination. This in many ways would determine the interaction that will follow and sometimes, there will be none.

Am I generalizing? I think so, but I have done this little experiment for over a dozen years and I now feel justified to make such a statement.

In some of these interactions, I would notice that there was a lot of coveting and rejecting. We wanted the beauty – clothes, looks, intelligence and rejected those that were not on par.

Did I mention that I was also guilty of this?

I was also coveting and rejecting.

Many times imagining how I would look in the said outfit or with the said hair.

But the question I failed to ask for so many years was ‘why’.

Why was it so important to want to look and act like someone else?

Why did I and all these other ladies feel the need to not only compare but to pass judgement based on what we had seen? Why did we always want what others had?

Before I attempt to answer these questions, even though these  would be better off rhetoric, let’s look at these issues from a different angle.

What kind of woman do you really think you are?

I recently listened to Pretty Hurts by Beyoncé, it was a powerful depiction of what the pursuit of beauty can do and does to women. She sang about the obsession with our outward appearance even though it is ‘the soul that needs the surgery’.

Wow, right!!

First of all, about 85% of the women I know are on some type of diet.

And many of these women have been on diets for most of their lives. I once heard about a girl who had sown together part of her teeth to stop herself from eating large portions of food. She was in her early twenties at the time. I was shocked when I heard this.

And there are so many similar stories.

Women who wore stomach slimmers to sleep just to have a defined waist, added socks to their bras, were bulimic, ate only protein, or only carbs or sawdust(what I call those diets that required one to eat only pre-packed powders).

We have done it all and more than our fair share in search of the unicorn. 

And the question comes back to ‘why?’

Why we want to be others, not like them but them. Why we crave, covet and desire and are often willing to do anything to get it. Even contemplating plastic surgery.

I remember a conversation with a friend who was contemplating surgery. We were once again agonizing about certain parts of our bodies, often the case in a congregation of women. And she said she would likely do something soon.

At that moment, I looked at her, really looked at her. She was a beautiful woman, unique in her own way but I realized that telling her that wouldn’t be enough. She saw herself a certain way and she believed she wasn’t good enough.

Many of us have become the judge and jury of our lives and we are often the worst kind.

Never considering all the facts and always giving ourselves ludicrous sentences.

You would notice that all this while, I haven’t said anything about God. There have been no Christian references. It wasn’t intentional but I can see it was necessary.

Many times, we sprinkle the Christian virtues into our conversation and writings like a dedicated citizen who believes her country’s anthem must be sung at every gathering.

We use it as a shield that often stops us from digging deep. We say, God loves you as you, which is true but not the full story.

There is an incredible depth to knowing God, not God as he is often shown to us in churches and religious gatherings, but the God who follows us into the dark crevices and indescribable messes of our lives.

Not the God that expects perfection but the God that understands the struggle but knows we can be better.

That’s the God I know and the God I want to talk about.

Because the journey to my healing, to overcoming the need to compare, to envy and criticizing other women happened because of him.

Oh! It’s still happening, I’m not there yet but I have seen incredible changes.

He helped me unlock that little girl, the curious and friendly one who had been happy just being herself. He helped me see the beauty in that.

He helped me realise that every single one of us are so precious to him, not because we are fat or skinny, tall or short and all the other differences the world has magnified in our eyes.

What about you?

How have things been? Whose definition of life and living are you choosing to believe?

What are you doing to yourself and to others in your pursuit of that standard? That standard that tells us we have to be a certain way, we have to look a certain way to be loved, to be accepted and to belong.

Yes, that was the outcome of my little observations all those years: most of us did what we did because, at the heart of it all, we wanted to be loved, to be accepted and to belong.

We didn’t want to be the outcasts, the ‘weird’ and ignored ones.

We wanted to be known and if it meant being someone else, we were willing to pay the price.

Thank God we don’t need to and will never need to. Jesus already paid that price and he loves us, accepts us and has made us a part of his everlasting family.

I know I have touched on a past many of us never want to revisit, but we must do so to free ourselves from the dungeon our fear and pride created.

But we mustn’t go alone, but with the Holy Spirit and our fellow sisters. Remember that you’re not alone. My story would have shown that I struggled for years to find myself and where I fit in.

Now I realize I was on a wild goose chase because I always had a place, a place love kept for me and a place where I can bloom and be all He called me to be.

Sis, you have a place too.

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