Of women and love

Source: google image search, collage made via photovisi.com

8^th of March is the International Women’s Day.

I don’t often think about this day with too much emotional investment but today is different. Today, this day means a lot to me. Today I want to celebrate the fact that I am a woman, together with all the women I know, have known and will ever know.

I was born in an era when women were allowed to study, work and think for themselves. I am fortunate to live in an unprecedented time in history, when women have already proven their worth in just about every single aspect of life, be it work, family or society. I am convinced I’ll get to live through times when women will be the leaders of this world and will succeed in making it a better place. And that’s because I am convinced women are made of love.

I’ve never really been a feminist. Never had to. Never felt I had to fight harder because I was a woman. No, sir. I  felt I had to fight harder because I was from a modest family, because I was an immigrant, because my English wasn’t English enough, because I was a bit fat and a bit ugly, because I wasn’t knowledgeable enough, because I didn’t know the right people to get to the right places and because I was impossible to love. Ever felt like that? Then you know what I mean. I never stopped to think with good thoughts about my femininity because I had so many issues to deal with, so many things to prove (or not to prove), so many battles to lose and so many things to feel sorry for myself about. It wasn’t because I was a woman. It was because everything was against me and everyone was right not to love me.I didn’t even love myself. And sometimes... I wished I was a man!

But once I got all those issues sorted and I began to love looking at myself in the mirror, I started to have feelings about my womanhood. I am convinced I was put into a woman’s body for a reason. I’m not saying women are better than men, I’m just saying women are different than men. There’s a different kind of energy going through a woman’s body and “…when you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet” as Eve Ensler rightly said in her famous 'The Vagina Monologues'. I feel we have a sacred duty towards ourselves as much as anyone else does. To deny our own femininity is to deny life and that, as sure as hell, is a deadly sin.

I feel privileged to live in a world (or more accurately, in a part of the world) where I don’t have to defend myself from attack and abuse. And precisely because I have this luxury, I have no excuse for not loving every single bit of me, for not rejoicing in what I am, for not being ecstatic at the thought that I exist in a form and shape so unique and wonderful and life giving. There is no reason in the world why I shouldn’t celebrate International Women’s Day with every ounce of my heart, there’s no reason in the world  why I shouldn't be grateful for all the beautiful, wonderful and loving women in my life, there's no reason why I shouldn't be grateful every single day to my mother for bringing me, through her own sacred womanhood, into this world and for protecting me through the gift of her unconditional love, so that nothing was ever going to be strong enough to break me. She bathed me in amniotic love and birthed me into a world which I chose to believe is a good one, with the potential of becoming an amazing world, if only we could start by loving ourselves a little bit more every day.

“The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina. The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change it's shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. So can the vagina. It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world. So can the vagina. I was there in the room. I remember.”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues