The Struggle (Or... Being a Woman Everyday, Always, Endlessly...)
Mornings always feel like a negotiation. I wake up already carrying fragments of myself, some restless, some calm, some that pretend to know what they’re doing. The day begins before I can even meet it. There’s a list waiting, even when I didn’t write one. The coffee, the small messages, the quiet mental math of how to show up without breaking. Some mornings I feel like I’m acting, like I’m piecing together a person from memory. Other times I feel entirely here, grounded in the weight of my own pulse. Either way, I move. That’s what it means to start the day. Movement is survival. I think about how many women are already awake, adjusting, managing, waiting for their own turn to breathe. It’s not sadness. It’s routine, and sometimes, routine feels like strength disguised as surrender.
There are moments when I catch myself disappearing into small tasks. The details eat time in quiet ways. I fix, fold, remember, anticipate. I smooth over edges, not out of duty but out of instinct. Maybe that’s how we stay afloat, by predicting small collapses before they happen. I watch myself doing this and wonder if it’s care or self-preservation. The world often mistakes them for the same thing. I’ve been told women multitask better, as if it were a gift instead of conditioning. I don’t think of it as talent. It’s a language. One built from repetition and memory. From watching, listening, holding, storing. I carry a thousand notes in my mind, and most of them are for someone else. But sometimes, late in the afternoon, I pause long enough to remember that I am one of the people I was supposed to care for too.
Evening brings a softer kind of awareness. The light changes and I can see what the day took from me. There’s always something left undone, but I’ve stopped seeing that as failure. I think being a woman is learning to live with unfinished things, inside and outside. There’s always a dish, a thought, a message waiting. Still, there’s a peace in the pause. I sit in it when I can. I watch the world fold into quieter sounds. The air carries a calm that doesn’t ask me to perform. I like to think this is where the truth of me lives, in the unguarded space between doing and resting. Here, I don’t have to be kind or capable or composed. I just have to be.
Sometimes I think about the women I pass each day. The ones who hold themselves like questions. The ones who laugh too loudly on purpose. The ones who keep their eyes low because it’s easier than explaining. We all carry versions of each other. I see my mother in the way a stranger fixes her hair. I see my friends in the quick nod of a woman holding her phone like a shield. There’s something shared between us that has nothing to do with knowing names. It’s the quiet recognition of endurance, the small awareness that someone else is holding their own version of the world together. I don’t know if that’s solidarity or simple survival, but it feels like both. It feels human.
At night I gather what’s left. The faces I wore during the day settle into one. The silence feels earned. The struggle doesn’t roar; it hums, steady and familiar. It’s not about triumph or protest or proving worth. It’s about the endless returning to self, the daily remembering that I am not just what the world sees. Some nights I feel proud of that. Other nights I just feel tired. But even in that tiredness there’s meaning. There’s proof of life. Tomorrow it will all start again, the quiet shaping, the invisible balancing, the motion that keeps everything standing. And I’ll meet it, as always, with whatever version of me the morning allows. That’s the work. That’s the pulse. That’s the struggle.
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