Being a Woman

By Tabbu Shaikh ||

Every morning at 5:30, while the city is still wrapped in darkness, Meera wakes up. She quietly prepares breakfast for her family, packs lunches for her husband and two children, checks their school bags, irons her own work clothes, and somehow finds ten minutes to breathe before rushing to catch the bus to her job at a local bank. By the time most people hit the snooze button, she has already carried the weight of an entire household on her shoulders. This is not a dramatic scene from a black and white movie. This is the everyday reality of millions of women around the world.

Being a woman has never been easy. It is a living, breathing story of evolution, the evolution of courage, quiet determination, fierce fights, and hard-won self-respect. For generations, she was told her place was simple: to prepare the bread. Her hands were meant for the home. Her ambitions were expected to remain silent. But deep inside her burned a refusal to stay small.

I will never forget the story of a woman named Sarah from a small town in the U.S. Midwest. At twenty-four, she had two young children and an abusive marriage. Every night she was told the same thing: “A good wife stays. A good mother sacrifices.” One winter evening, after another painful fight, she looked at her sleeping daughters and made a decision that changed everything. With only forty dollars in her pocket and no support from her family, she walked out that door carrying her children. She worked two jobs, cleaning offices at dawn and waiting tables at night, while studying accounting through online courses on a borrowed laptop. Years later, I heard about the remarkable life she had built for herself. She was no longer the broken woman who left that house. She had become a senior financial analyst at a respected firm, owned her own small apartment, and was raising two confident daughters who watched their mother build a life from nothing. When I asked her what gave her the strength, her eyes filled with fire. “I realized that staying in such a relationship was a slow death. Leaving was the revolution.”

That moment – that single act of walking out with almost nothing – became her first real step of freedom. The money she eventually earned was not just currency. It was power. It was choice. It was the ability to say “no” and the courage to say “I deserve better.” It took decades of women like Sarah fighting, bleeding, studying in secret, crying in silence, and standing up again to create even this basic right: to earn her own money and carry her own freedom in her hands.

But society has never welcomed this awakening easily.

Just last month, I spoke with a friend in Seoul named Ji-eun. She is a marketing manager who was recently offered a major promotion that required occasional travel. Her own mother worried aloud, “What will people say if you’re not home every night? Who will take care of the house?” The same society that praises women for their endless patience suddenly panics the moment she chooses herself. If she bears everything quietly, she is called graceful. The moment she fights for her rights, her growth, or even simple respect, she is labeled difficult, selfish, or “too ambitious.”

We see it everywhere. The working mother judged for sending her child to daycare. The young professional passed over for a project because “she might have a baby soon.” The woman who is expected to smile through harassment on the street or unfair treatment at work. Traditions, old expectations, and invisible boundaries are still used as weapons to keep her in her “proper place.”

Yet something unstoppable is happening.

From the mother who fights for equal chores after a full workday, to the engineer who designs aircraft, to the young student learning coding late at night on a shared family phone, every one of them is rewriting history in small but powerful ways.

They are no longer just preparing bread. They are earning it, multiplying it, feeding families, building careers, and most importantly, feeding their own souls. Yes, there are still days when the question returns like an old wound: Is being a woman a curse?

When the exhaustion feels unbearable. When she is blamed for things, she cannot control. When she must choose between her dreams and her responsibilities. In those dark moments, it can truly feel like a curse. But then she looks at how far she has come. From needing permission to exist to literally ruling the skies as pilots, CEOs, scientists, leaders, and changemakers. She has created her own paths where none existed before. She has turned pain into power.

She rules the skies. She has become fearless.

To every woman reading this, no matter where you are, whether in Gwangju, Seoul, New York, Lagos, or São Paulo, your seemingly ordinary days are actually extraordinary. The way you carry both your dreams and your responsibilities, the way you refuse to shrink even when the world asks you to, the way you still find strength at midnight to study, create, or simply keep going – this is courage in its purest form. Never apologize for wanting more. Your salary, your voice, your choices, your independence. These are quiet revolutions happening in kitchens, offices, and hearts every single day.

The most beautiful chapters are being written right now, by the woman who wakes up before the sun, carries her family and her dreams at the same time, and still finds the courage to tell her daughter: “You never have to beg for the right to be fully yourself.”

That woman is you. That woman is me.

That woman lives in all of us.

And together, we are changing the world.

Cover Photo: Symbol of the women’s movement, 1970s.