Women In Your World

This following poem is born from history, but it breathes in the present. It draws from centuries where women were shaped by systems that claimed to protect them while quietly erasing them,through laws, customs, and social codes that taught obedience as virtue and silence as safety. From patriarchal honor to colonial ideas of “respectability,” women were not only controlled from the outside but trained to internalize the gaze watching them. That inheritance has not disappeared. Today, little girls are still taught softly, repeatedly, to see themselves through approval, through desirability, through how well they fit into someone else’s idea of womanhood. The mirror becomes a rehearsal, not a reflection. Unlearning this conditioning is not sudden or gentle; it is a long, painful undoing of praise that felt like love, of rules disguised as care, of identities trimmed to survive. This poem sits in that difficult in-between space: the slow, exhausting journey of peeling back what the world demanded she be, just to ask, often for the first time, what she actually is and what she wants.

She looks in the mirror, it’s her eyes, but not her gaze,

Irony of whatever a man does, a woman can,

they named the cage progress, wrote it as praise.

They live in her head now, enforce the plan,

trained her so well, she polices the ban.

Praised when she’s quiet, obedient, small,

Even praised when she’s ruined, just not real at all.

Be a good girl, be pure, be clean.

Be a bad girl, be watched, be seen.

They love her saint, they love her sin,

but never the woman who lives in between.

She’s shown the world from a borrowed view,

a window, a veil, never hers to choose.

“One day,” they promise, to keep her in place,

while unlearning feels like peeling her face.

She can’t be human, uneven, grey,

that scares a world that needs black or white to stay.

They don’t hate women for wrong or right,

they hate the ones who stand on this blurred sight.

Expected to birth humans but be artistic machines ourselves,

So that the world keeps finding its peace in train, question and stare.

Women can't be humans we need to be angels or devils, just not alive.

And that’s the crime we survive....

or do we?