To Be a Woman...

A collective group of women in unison celebrating one another

Yesterday a friend hosted a TikTok live on the topics of being a woman and seeking real solutions which may affect us and our living situations.

As I was listening to the ladies share their independent experiences, I was thinking about my own experiences as a child, engulfed in stories like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, believing I would be rescued from the hellscape of my parents' controlling ways. But there was also this romanticism accompanied with that “rescue mission”.

Thinking about it now, as a teenager, I think in some form, all of us have been through the struggle when our parents would tell us no, feeling as though they are mean on purpose, when on the contrary, it was just my parents protecting us. I mean why would anyone find it okay to let their child out at 9PM, unlike today where it seems to be the norm for teens to be out and about all hours of the night.

I also grew up in a time within the 80’s where most of us lived “alone” since we had parents who had to go out and work. We were already “coming into the days” when the middle class, which was most of us, living in a two-parent or even single-parent household were left to our own devices with our parents trusting us we were going to do the right thing.

As I became aware of the world around me, boys liking girls and girls liking boys, it hit me early on, I was not the type of girl boys really weren't into as I wasn't "fully developed".

There was also another thing, I didn’t feel pretty enough. I noticed a lot of the girls back in my Jr. High School days were allowed to wear makeup and even though I tried to sneak make up on, my mom would always catch me, telling me when I'm grown up, I can wear all the makeup I want.

And while all these external cosmetics were available, the fact was, it was my self-esteem that hindered me every time I looked at myself in the mirror. I liked a lot of boys, but a lot of boys didn’t like me back. It was the one thing which lacked in my life, because instead of concentrating on my education or practicing something I really loved, I was focused on being accepted by my peers. If it wasn’t for the lack of fashionable clothes back then, it was the unmanaged mane of curls I had.

When all the makeup, the lack of keeping up with the 80s fashion, cigarette habits and relaxing my hair didn’t work, I turned to substance abuse which got worse over time and without going into the sordid details, let's just say, my "colorful" short lived substance abuse life, lasted for a short time and here we are 35 years later clean and sober.

But when I first got clean, I was reverted back to that 14-year-old girl, who never deal with the insecurities I had and so the journey began.

While every woman's story is different from what defines what you believed as a child onto adulthood, we all relate to one another.

Within my own personal journey is finding out how women who refuse the collaboration and the relating to other woman because of bigotry and race, among other things but this is mostly the majority of what is happening in our world today.

As social media has become the "foreground" of how we connect with one another, the “face to face” time, the dinners, lunches and even coffee meetings have become a thing of the past, when in all honesty, it doesn't have to be that way.

We are choosing apps over the face-to-face meetings.

Is it because we allowed the pandemic to make permanent choices on how we live moving forward? Is it because we lost trust and faith in what it means to be humanitarian? Or are we choosing to be humanitarian while giving up on others who have a different belief system?

There's no right or wrong answer.

The part of my sobriety journey is not to arrive to get an answer is to enjoy the journey to continue growing, seeking answers and leaving a legacy for others to follow. Sometimes we will get solutions and within those solutions is where we leave the legacy.

We cannot change our past, we cannot change events that happened to us, whether it makes us bitter, angry or hurt our hearts, these events are what make us who we are and how we learn from that.

I saw in the chat yesterday, someone made a comment on how the word "young lady" triggered them. My first thoughts were, "get over it". Why would that be so triggering?

My mind went to a memory I had when I was doing what we called "Public Information" work within the 12 Step fellowship. What Public Information did was work with outside organizations like rehabs where we would bring 12 step meetings to the patients there.

In one of those meetings, I had a can of soda in a brown paper bag. I did that because if it spilled the bag would get it first.

There was a girl at that meeting who asked if I could take out the soda out of the bag because it triggered her. I complied but was annoyed.

I sometimes think we live in a world today where we place too much emphasis on words and then expect the world to comply with our needs when we need to fix ourselves first.

While the term "young lady" can be used in a derogatory manner, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a derogatory term. Imagine a setting where someone is being directed towards you for a request and they say, "this young lady is waiting for you". How is that bad?

Imagine if they said, "that lady over there is there waiting for you?" Sounds unpleasant, doesn't it? Almost as if you're an annoyance being waited on.

My point being, even though we can have words which may trigger an unpleasant experience, that word doesn't represent who we are today.

Hence when black people are hurled with "N" slurs, most do not react to it....why? Because they know that word doesn't represent who they are. If anything, when hearing that word, represents the person who's hurling it as a bigot.

In 12-step recovery we say, "the joy is in the journey". The journey sometimes will not be great, and parts of our journeys will come with pain.

The world isn't built on coddling our discomforts. What we experience whether with words or actions, they do not define who we are today.

We may not like the world around us today, however, that should stop us from being who we are or what we aspire to be. The world is not here to fix us; we are here to fix ourselves and be a power of example to others through education, reasoning and kindness.

Until then. Take care of You.

Loves and Hugs,

Marabelle Blue