From Girlhood to Womanhood

When did we decide it was time to grow up? It seems like a simple, even logical question, but it isn’t once you apply a bit of critical thinking and analysis. It’s common, especially in Western societies, to associate maturity with a series of stages. Depending on how much money your family has, you’ll live a certain way. Because of that, you’ll enjoy more, or on the contrary less, of the stages of your life. And that’s not even mentioning what happens when you add the condition of being a woman to that imbalance.

You’re born, you barely become aware of yourself, and one of the first things you learn is how to sit while wearing a skirt, or what to do and what not to do with your legs. How to greet people with a kiss, especially boys. And with time, adolescence finds us at the edge of childhood, when Barbies no longer represent us the way they used to. Then we reach the stage that can be summed up in a single sentence: Be careful not to get pregnant. In short, almost everything is shaped by the gender we were born into. It’s hard to go against the current.

Girls grow up in a bubble. At first, everything is a diminutive. It’s not house, it’s little house, and the colors of everything are the perfect representation of beauty. But at the same time, any girl who grew up with brothers can tell you that the way we’re treated by everyone is completely different. We notice it for the first time with our teachers at school. There are restrictions that seem to follow a certain pattern. Maybe that’s why girls who don’t like pink and who prefer rock over pop seem destined for marginalization.

It’s incredibly hard for us to understand these differences in how we’re treated. And very soon we realize that what awaits us from other girls, classmates, coworkers, and colleagues, is even harsher. The transition from what was once presented to us as ideal, beautiful, and perfect turns out to be nothing more than an illusion. Along the way, we learned whether we wanted to or not that trust is a difficult verb to apply to others. Paradoxically, it is less difficult toward men than toward women. We are women now, and we repeat the cycle endlessly, or at least that’s what some of us are willing to change.

We live in a world designed for inequality. You can see it in every latitude and every aspect of life. A few people dominate everyone else’s lives. It’s not conspiracy or fatalism; it is what it is. We love hope, but we’re not prepared to break the vicious cycle. I suppose it’s better to promote the beauty of childhood, the instability of adolescence, and the boredom of adulthood with some changes. We have to learn to be more empathetic and better human beings. I still don’t understand why it’s so hard to make female friends. There are always a thousand buts and very few solutions. After all, it’s necessary to redefine what it means to be a woman.