She Still Wants to Go to India
The strange ways we convince ourselves that we're not free to want the lives we actually want.
I got chatting with a woman recently. She’d just turned 40 and has a little girl the same age as mine. She was curious and I was curious and we’d soon shared life stories.
She told me that in her early 20s she’d taken a 3 month trip to the States as a graduation present to herself, eyes opened - she returned home to save her butt off so she could travel extensively in India. She was pulled to go there, and go there she would.
Soon after moving back home with her parents she landed a job. Then she met a boy, fell in love, and that boy became her husband. They bought a house, had a baby. Then they had another baby. The kids are no longer babies. And she still hasn’t gone to India.
I asked her if she still wanted to and her response was as you’d expect, “Ha. I have a mortgage. The kids are in school. I cannot.”
I asked her again if she wanted to.
She looked down to the floor, and sighed softly “Of course…”.
I had lived in country after country where women were continue to be treated like second class citizens. After a decade working in the Middle East and Asia I was enraged.
I had seen young, 13yr old girls get married off to men at least three times their age, to spend the rest of their lives in his family home, in servitude to a person who could walk, talk, work, spit, sh*t and f*k wherever he wanted. She would barely leave that home for the rest of her life. Have children their. Look after grandchildren their. Die there.
I walked through garment factories where young, unmarried women would bury their heads into their headscarves as they were spat and sworn at. They fought to earn their $1.30 a day in bone-aching labour because they dared to dream of a different future.
My female colleagues in the UN remain to this day my most admired. Women who were ferociously smart, and ambitious, and proactive. My god, they worked. And I know every single one of these brilliant individuals would return home, to a household where they were required to be submissive otherwise they would be beaten. If not by their husbands, by their mothers-in-law.
So when someone tells me they cannot I often want to shake them and tell them loudly and without reservation that they damn well CAN.
But I know the ways we lose our courage and our belief, and in doing so our dreams.
This slapped me in my face returning to Australia. A land where women are considered equal and patriarchy is dead! - to realise that we are not so free at all. Our lives are obviously and objectively more equal - and yet I began to notice how my voice would soften and my needs get smaller in the presence of male family members. I didn’t call out the inherited gender roles that had me, my sister and mother still being the ones cooking, and cleaning while the men talked or watched the telly. Even as a worldly and angry feminist I felt myself shrink under the lingering yet insidious effect of the patriarchy that had me believe that I was simply less worthy,
and thus less empowered to do what I want.
That personal reckoning is what spurred me on to start my own business. I wanted to create a space where women could reimagine and reclaim what it was to be a woman, to be in their bodies, to know what they want and to return to themselves.
I wanted a space where women moved beyond whinging with their girlfriends to actually feel their power in the way they held themselves, how they enjoyed the pleasure of their bodies, in the boundaries they held firm to, the needs began to state, and the dreams - and aliveness - they dare to pursue.
Because there are women who genuinely don’t have the freedom to do that. And then there are the women who have those freedoms but have forgotten that they have it.
I think we can all take a regular dose of a broader perspective. To see our lives through someone else’s lives. To realise just how much choice we actually have, and how unhindered we really are.
You may have a mortgage to pay-off. But you are still free.
You still have a choice.
You still have power.
We all have constraints and responsibilities.
But we still have agency within them.
There are millions and millions of woman who do not.
The modern day world is so good at convincing us that the joy and fulfilment we are lacking lie on the other side of the apps, and QR codes, and buy-now checkouts - and we become so extraordinarily good at satisfying our smallest desires that we push aside the big ones.
I don’t know if that woman necessarily needs to go to India. But she needs to know that India is still hers to choose.
Underneath all the roles we take on, employee, wife, mother, daughter, homeowner - there is still a woman with wants of her own.
You are allowed to follow the feeling that says, there is more life for me than this.