What does the Wonder Woman want?

In trying to escape old stories that glorified us as self-sacrificing sanskaari women, have we created another story of the hyper-independent, ultra-successful, ‘good at everything woman’ who does not need anyone, asks Reema Ahmad

My dear, dear women,

It is hard to believe how far we have come, how astoundingly far. From a time and place in history where our desires and needs had no place to a time where our needs find room in board meetings and hiring committees.

Our desires shape the marketplace and government policies; they force the economy to pay attention to this surging power that is womanhood.

From fashion, design, beauty, healthcare to even sex toy companies and dating sites, everyone has to reckon with what we want, what will please us. From being calendar goddesses on peeling walls to gleaming billboards that declare our strength, we have traversed the stained pages of history with massive power and grace.

And we had to fight to get here — gruelling fights that began in our grandmothers’ kitchens and spilt over in bedrooms, to streets that saw protests and demonstrations — we have held forth through gritted teeth and blood-stained faces. We took centuries to reach a place where we can name violence when it happens to us, where the law has our back even if it is hard to implement. In families, offices, courtrooms and panchayats, we have a voice and we can use it, even if it is hard to make it heard sometimes.

We have made miracles possible through the steel of our will, our pens, our businesses and our enduring bodies. But miracles entail a lot of sacrifices. All this fighting has made our bodies stiff and achy; it has also made us hard taskmasters, mostly to ourselves. We push ourselves to unimaginable limits, setting endless goals that we must/should/have to reach. The world doesn’t make this easy and we are constantly forced to wriggle with choices; should I give up this or that, what do I prioritise, what do I take up and what do I leave behind? The dance of choosing makes us breathless, but we push on.

There is now a loud, soaring script for us that says ‘you’re a successful modern woman only if you earn a certain amount, look a certain way, dress a certain way, speak a certain way, keep winning, never rest, always hustle to be the ultimate boss lady’.

Patriarchy was represented by a lot of diktats that told us how we should be and in fighting that very monster; we have created another one for ourselves that tells us that we cannot claim to be a strong modern woman unless we check all the boxes on this script. This monster says that we can have everything, we should have everything. But this everything comes at a huge cost.

The cost is often haywire hormones, wrecked sleep, weight issues, chronic fatigue and illness, severe anxiety, lack of trust and ease and more often than we’d like to admit, crushing heartbreak, failed relationships and loneliness.

In a world where we must look good, stay fit, not age, dress well, be sexy, be confident and also ace projects, raise kids, win awards, have a social life, personal life and social media presence all at the same time, the one person we endlessly punish is our own self.

And in all this pushing and pulling what we often end up feeling is a dissonance, a deep disconnect with our inner being and an inability to articulate even to ourselves, what we may really want. And often times we seem to want contradictory things. We want deep fulfilling relationships but we struggle with the vulnerability that comes with those. Or we want sexual fulfilment through casual relationships but are afraid to admit that we’re lonely and want care. We love the excitement boys give us but we hate the heartbreak that comes with them. We want demanding, creatively fulfilling careers but we lament the loss of time, health, and community when we are too consumed by work.

We want to look pretty, be sensuous and attractive but are often exhausted by the effort it takes to look ‘effortlessly good’. We want children but we don’t like the emotional, physical and mental strain that comes with raising them. We hire maids to look after them but then we hate ourselves for doing that. The constant pulls within us rock our boats and make us seasick.

We, dear women, have fallen prey to the lure of single stories. In trying to escape old stories that glorified us as self sacrificing sanskaari women, we have created another story of the hyper independent, ultra successful, ‘good at everything woman’ who does not need anyone. Earlier, we suffered at the high standards that society created for us and now we feel stuck in those created by our own selves. Like spiders caught in their own webs, we don’t know where our bondage begins and where it ends.

In listening to the noise of poster girls who proclaim that there is only one way of being a modern woman, we have lost our own voice that may want a bit of the old and some of the new in her life. We grow ashamed of our own needs that say ‘I need rest, I need a break from work or I need love.’ We push away rest for fear of appearing weak, we refuse the support offered to us for fear of appearing dependent and we refuse to let men take care of us (on the rare occasions that this happens) for fear of appearing anti-feminist. But what we forget is that human beings are complex creatures.

There is no way of slicing away our evolutionary selves that live in our DNA from the selves that are now emerging. The past continues to live in us even as the present takes shape. Like an ocean made of many rivers, our histories swirl in us even as the future takes birth in our deep waters. Life is not a tightrope that we need to balance on, afraid to fall on either side.

What if we could bring ourselves to look at life as a dance that changes tempo as the music evolves? What if we refuse to follow any script, not the old or the new? What if we create for our own selves a colourful mosaic that is made of different pieces from different times? Our actions, choices in tune with our core; separate from any trends that push on us ‘cool’ ways of being. But to do that, dear women we must filter out noise — the noise of past pain and the noise from systems around us that say ‘do this, do that.’

Each of us is a unique blend and there is no recipe to us that can be memorised, written down or passed on as perfect. There is no need to be perfect either. What we need is our inner compass; our unique being that tells us what we want, what we need at different phases of life.

To do that we need to step in from the outside; to stop assessing, measuring, observing our own actions all the time. What we need is permission from ourselves to give in to what may seem odd, look weird, and feel uncomfortable.

And perhaps as we tune in to our unique frequency, sensing the discomfort of our nakedness, what we will arrive at is a story that has no name, no shape, and no form — a story that is forever becoming.

All my love,

A woman like you.

(The author is an NLP-based life coach, trauma and relationships counsellor & a TEDx speaker.)