Someone close to me recently asked me how I experience being a woman. The question sounded neutral at first, but the longer I pondered it, the less linear it became. It brought up even more questions. Like why it is something that in this day and age is still shrouded in mystery. Why do we need a blog post about what it is like to be a woman. Why are we still unseen in our wholeness.
As much as I would love to go into the depth of every aspect of what it actually means to be a woman, this piece is centred around one particular moment in life. It’s one of those moments your entire body can describe, though rarely out loud.
Something that arrives quietly, before you even realise it, just in the middle of an ordinary day. Perhaps while you’re doing something completely unremarkable, like the dishes, a workout, sitting in a meeting, you feel a sudden shift.
Something shifts loudly and once it does, you cannot unfeel it. And in the days or weeks, or even months that follow, it slowly dawns on you what this shift entails.
The whisper of your true self tries to break through the endless layers of what it means to be a woman, which you have draped on your shoulders over the years. Some layers were put there unknowingly, some of them without complaint, some of them out of duty or love.
This shift is not a dramatic moment. It happens without anyone noticing it. Though you do.
Life continues to demand exactly what it always has, and you continue to give it exactly that. And you try your best to give it with the same conviction, vigour and persistence, but somehow your bucket feels emptier. You’re afraid to look inside it, because you already know what’s there. Drought.
You have nearly nothing left to give, but you have to keep giving. Why? Because you’re a woman. You’re a mother, a friend, a spouse, a daughter.
The Cost Nobody Warned You About
Women are shaped from an early age to manage themselves around others. Be palatable. Keep the peace. Don’t take up too much space. By the time we are adults, we have become exceptionally skilled at reading the room, anticipating needs, absorbing tension and doing emotional labour. Not because we were born with it, but because this is how we learned to survive in a society that wasn’t designed for women.
It’s a vigilance that has a very real cost. However, that cost is paid slowly, quietly, over years. The bill then arrives somewhere in the middle of life, when life has become most demanding and the self is becoming seriously depleted. Mentally, emotionally, physically and existentially.
Perimenopause sets in. Relationships plateau or end. Children leave home. Or exactly nothing changes at all and somehow that is the hardest thing. Realising that life is full but something essential is still missing after all those years.
Underneath all of it, the woman who used to know herself is still there. Still there, carrying the freedom she was born with, but never quite allowed to keep.
And the hardest part is that even though you have recognised that feeling in other women, perhaps your mother, or a friend, you still can’t name the grief of integrating the fact you have spent years giving yourself away in small bits and pieces without realising what it would cost you.
I chose to become a mother at a young age, and I thought I understood what that would change in my life. I did not.
What I was not prepared for was how much raising a daughter would force me to see myself. To acknowledge the beliefs and frameworks I had been living inside, ones that had protected me, but also ones that had kept me small. Rules I had internalised so completely that I had stopped noticing them. It wasn’t what I wanted for my daughter, but it became painfully clear it also wasn’t what I wanted for myself.
So there I was in my early twenties, trying to reparent myself as well as guide a young girl in her first encounters with the world. I was learning everything, alongside a child, that I had never been fully taught. That my instincts were trustworthy. That my anger was information, not a flaw. That my emotions were medicine, not weakness. And that softness and strength were not opposites I had to choose between.
She is almost grown now. And I am still learning every single day. Still becoming more of me as I see her becoming more of herself.
Through life’s transitions something valuable becomes available. Not despite their difficulty, but because of it.
When a woman is able to stop, really actually stop, and see herself, she is able to not just endure a passage in life but to understand it and fully embody herself in it. Something inside her will change what it used to cost her into what it adds to her.
The weight doesn’t disappear, but she becomes the steadiness that helps her navigate it. The grief gets a name. The former self that was buried under all those years of roles, rules and requirements starts to slowly resurface.
She will not return to who she was before, nor should she.
That woman is gone, and honestly, she doesn’t need to come back. What becomes possible is something more complete. A woman who has lived through the deepest loss there is, the loss of herself, and still found her way back. She knows things she could not have known otherwise. About what she will and will not carry. About her boundaries. About what she actually wants without the noise of what she was told to want.
That knowledge is hard won gold.
But it is real.
And it’s hers.
By Kimberley Sol
The Woman You’re Becoming Is Already There
The Awakening Woman programme was created for women who have felt the shift, who know something has changed, and who are ready to find out what comes next.
You don’t have to figure it out alone.
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