Even as a young girl, I knew I was different. I didn’t play with dolls or dream of a white dress. What I craved was freedom—to live life on my own terms.
By fourteen, I had a quiet sense that my path might unfold differently.
I grew up in Brooklyn, where the city moved fast—and so did the lessons.
My childhood taught me to be vigilant—to pick up on nuances, subtleties, and make sense of unspoken rules.
I noticed early on how women moved through the world—smiling, serving, sacrificing. Always proper. Always composed. It was most obvious at church, which seemed more concerned with appearances than with connection, as if they were constantly calculating how much space they were allowed to occupy—physically, emotionally, energetically.
Men moved through life with far fewer restrictions.
By my mid-teens, I understood how quickly safety could be stolen—and how important it was to pay attention and hold my ground. I briefly entertained modeling as a form of creative expression, but learned how unsafe that landscape could be. During a school internship, two men offered to photograph me—then tried to get me to take off my top. I left and never went back.
I was so young—thankfully, defiant.
By seventeen, I was already changing out of my skirt suit to hide in an oversized hoodie after work—dodging attention on the subway home. I wasn’t naive. I made sure I wasn’t a victim. I learned to protect myself.
I was aware of injustice: the entitlement of men, the silence of women, the burden of being sexualized. It didn’t just wound me— it sharpened me. That refusal to play along shaped my independence and became part of my identity.
The power of beauty and youth was a double-edged sword: a currency that often came at a price. I often navigated a landscape of overt or covert sexualization. Power and vulnerability danced a constant, uneasy tango. That hyper-awareness followed me into adulthood—into most jobs I had.
And the pressure to be thin—not healthy, just thin. Acceptable. Contained. Desirable on someone else’s terms. It was everywhere: fat-free everything, grains over real food, and wasn’t red meat supposed to be bad for you? We were taught to ignore hunger. Be thin. Eat less. Be less.
I never saw a man turn down a steak.
At times, I think I unconsciously gained weight—both as a form of rebellion and as a kind of protection.
I was well aware of the unwritten rules: how a woman should look, behave, sacrifice, and stay silent—the unspoken codes about what to say, what to hide, and which feelings were unacceptable to show.
I preferred black jeans, boots, and Led Zeppelin tees over playing dress-up, and wore makeup my way. I found freedom in the melting pot of NYC—a place full of contradictions, but also crevices where I could belong.
I was always observing. Drawing. Writing.
I grew up caught between cultural expectations and the times: be independent, but not too bold; be intelligent, but not intimidating; be kind, but not too outspoken.
Still, the larger expectation was clear: marriage, motherhood, and selflessness were the measure of a woman’s worth.
Over time, my mother folded herself into that blueprint—church on Sundays, dinner on the table, aspiring to be the perfect housewife—even as something remained unresolved beneath it all.
There were secrets—burdens too heavy to name.
The undercurrents were strong, even when words were absent. Navigating complex emotions without tools—or language—became second nature to me.
There wasn’t one dramatic moment of rebellion—just a slow accumulation of knowing. A quiet refusal to disappear into the life expected of me.
My mother lived in a world of secrecy, shame, and survival—a world that shaped her sense of self, and silently shaped mine.
It’s only now, looking back, that I fully understand the weight she carried. The silence. The loss. The forced choices.
The cost of a life she didn’t fully choose—severed parts of her—and some of those fragments lived on in me. In some ways, I became the part of herself she had long buried, and couldn’t bear to see in me.
Choosing not to have children was, in many respects, a selfless act—a refusal to pass down pain I hadn’t yet worked through.
I broke the cycle.
I took the long way home.
I didn’t reject motherhood.
I rejected the cage.
“The world tells us how to be women. Our mothers show us what it costs.”
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