The Day I Entered Women's History

March 8th

Today is Women’s Day.

For many years, this date passed me by like a distant holiday. I watched from outside, like someone seeing a party through the window of a house they were never invited to enter. There were flowers, speeches, tributes; and I never quite knew where I belonged in that scene.

Today, for the first time, I feel the door has opened.

But stepping into this space was not simple.
Nor light.
Nor quick.

Being a woman, for me, was not a birthright. It was a slow, painful discovery and, at the same time, a profoundly liberating one. It was like learning a language that had always lived inside me, but that the world insisted on teaching me to forget.

Transition is often described as an outward transformation; clothes, name, voice, body. But the truth is that the greatest change happens in silence, in places no one sees.

It happens in the way you begin to inhabit your own skin.

Before, I lived like someone wearing a character they had learned to play far too well. I knew the expected gestures, the right answers, the proper posture. The world seemed satisfied with that version of me.

But inside, there was a constant noise.
A kind of misalignment between who I was and who I was asked to be.

When I finally began walking toward myself, I discovered something curious: becoming who you are also means losing things along the way.

I lost old versions of myself.
I lost gazes that once recognized me.
I lost some people who did not know how to keep up with the change.

There is a silent mourning in every transition.

No one talks much about it, but growing, in whatever form it takes, is also learning to bury certain possible lives. Sometimes I miss places I can no longer return to, affections that only existed for someone I no longer am.

And still, I would do it all again.

Because somewhere along that difficult road, something I had never felt before happened: a strange, almost timid peace began to emerge.

The peace of looking in the mirror and no longer feeling that someone is missing there.

Today, when I think about what it means to be a woman, I do not think of a set of rules or roles. I do not think of rigid expectations or closed definitions.

I think of something more human.

Being a woman, for me, is feeling the world with an intensity I never used to allow myself. It is discovering a sensitivity that always existed, but that can now breathe. It is noticing the beauty in small things: in care, in listening, in the way we build shelter in one another.

Being a woman is also understanding the quiet strength that lives inside vulnerability.

Today I understand better the stories I hear. I understand the pain that runs through generations of women. I understand the courage it takes to simply keep existing in a world that so often tries to diminish us.

And perhaps that is what moves me most on this day.

I was not born inside this story.
But I walked into it.

With fear.
With tears.
With loss.

But also with hope.

Today I celebrate the women who have always been by my side, even before I knew who I was. I celebrate those who welcomed me along the way. I celebrate those who fought long before me so that today I could simply exist.

And I also celebrate the woman I am becoming.

She is still being woven, thread by thread.
Between scars and discoveries.
Between farewells and new beginnings.

But for the first time in my life, I feel I am finally wearing my own story.

And that, more than any tribute, is already a silent miracle.