Dear Girls, Don’t Use Your Body as the Path to Power

Any privilege associated with being a woman seems to be a double-edged sword.

Growing up, I received many mixed messages about what it meant to be a woman.

My goal, as a young girl, was simple: I wanted to be loved.

But I didn’t really understand what I had to do to be loved, especially when my own father practically abandoned me a long time ago.

He instilled in me the insecurity that, no matter what I did to be loved, it probably wouldn’t work. When I was a bit older, as a result, I struggled to relate to men romantically. I didn’t know how to be good enough for a man’s love.

That helpless feeling followed me throughout my young years and became a driving force behind my (misguided) decisions in my early twenties. I was fixated on power, thinking that if I couldn’t be loved by a man, then I wanted to be powerful — more powerful than a man.

I didn’t realise that the world isn’t designed to make women powerful.

There are traps everywhere. Any privilege associated with being a woman seems to be a double-edged sword.