Becoming a Woman

by Sopho Kharazi

The air is crispy in the morning, says a person who arrived home at 7 am. Today is very gloomy and grey, the weather that can put any breathing creature into silent desperation. But somehow I am loving it. Somehow everything feels silent today – my brain, my ears, even the music I am listening to right now. “Be water my friend” is the condition I have been carrying throughout the whole 4 hours since I have been awake. I will probably go back to bed shortly and this silence will continue another ten hours.

Today I watched one of my favorite movies The Hours. I have been rewatching this movie since I was 14. I always resonated with all the three female characters who are so melancholic, sad, and depressed mainly because they feel that they do not own their lives. In my teenage years, I felt very close to the character of Nicole Kidman due to one phrase she screams out of her lungs in the train station scene: “I am dying in this town.” That is how I felt while living in my hometown – suffocating with limited possibilities and a narrow mindset. The protagonist played by Julianne Moore touched my soul with the idea of a woman who had to live the model of a happy life which was not for her. In my younger years, I would catch myself persuading my inner self that I would be happy to settle down in my hometown, have a 9 to 5 office job, give birth to children, and live a life with my then-boyfriend. But I chose not to follow this illusion because that is not what I wanted. I least resonated with the character of Meryl Streep because I have never been and still am not a people pleaser, but similarly to her, I have experienced the feeling of living in the past a lot and it took me years to learn how to view the past as just a tense.

I rewatched this movie today while being heavily hormonal due to the pre-menstrual cycle. It has been a good seven years since I last saw the film and the way I perceived each character’s struggle today was so novel and different to me. I do not know how to explain it but I understood them very differently this time, more maturely, more womanly. And this made me realize that I am finally entering the period of womanhood with all the growth I have been accumulating. I was talking with my friends lately about this, telling them that it feels as if life is changing but not in a material sense (moving to a new place, etc.) but in a sense that feels like closing a chapter and opening a new one. And this new chapter feels like finally holding hands with a woman within me who I 100% own and who has emerged at a very natural pace, not forcefully.

I was talking with my mom, sharing how fast I get into someone and how equally fast I get bored. And I asked her why is it happening to me. She said that by observing me she realizes that I do not allow myself to fully open my heart and emerge into the idea of falling in love with someone. So after that talk, I sat down and genuinely asked myself what I wanted in life. And it was the first time I loudly confessed to myself that alongside my career, I wish to have a family, a cozy place I call home (not in my country of origin though), children, boring dinner parties with friends, evening cooking sessions with my husband, and a routine of running daily errands. As much as it does not sound crazy revolutionary, I always felt ashamed of the idea that I could want such a life. I thought that for the possibilities that today’s world gives us, wanting such a basic and to an extent boring life, is embarrassing. But, not anymore. I guess that is a mature woman talking in me.