The platinum in my hair has settled now.
When I look back at the girl I was, I remember the way things were.
I grew up in a traditional family. The women were loved and cared for. Nothing they needed was denied. But decisions were made elsewhere.
I watched my aunt become a widow far too young. I watched her world narrow without anyone announcing that it had done so. Nothing violent. Nothing loud. Just a life quietly rearranged.
I watched women ask before they acted, not because they were incapable, but because that was the order of things.
And yet, in the middle of that life, there was my father.
When gatherings were divided into rooms, men here and women there, he would reach for me and pull me to his side.
“Think like a man,” he would say.
For him, I could do no wrong. I was intelligent. Capable. Limitless.
He made me strong.
I am who I am because of him.
But strength is not the same as personhood.
Strength teaches you how to survive the room.
Personhood teaches you that you belong in it.
Years later, when I found myself standing at an edge I did not know how to step back from, I heard a line that changed my life:
“You are a spark of the Divine Light. Recognize your origin.”
Even now, when I write those words, my eyes mist, and my heart tightens.
Something that had been quietly inherited loosened in that moment.
I was no longer someone’s future responsibility.
No longer someone’s transferred duty.
No longer an extension of another life.
I was not strong because I could think like a man.
I was real because I was Light.
And that realization gave me something no structure could take away:
The right to exist.
Not to be granted space.
Not to be permitted a voice.
But simply to be.
On days when we celebrate women, we speak of equality and empowerment.
I understand why.
But the greatest gift I was given was not empowerment.
It was recognition.
Recognition that my life was not owned.
That my voice was not borrowed.
That my existence was not conditional.
That recognition saved me.
And even now, I am grateful.
Grateful that I heard the Melody.
Grateful that I was told I was Light.
So if there is anything I offer on a day like this, it is not wisdom.
It is gratitude made visible.
I was given the knowing that I am a spark of the Divine Light.
And I pass it on.
