Like A River.

Leo Rivas

I’ve often said with such conviction that despite women often getting the short end of the stick in life (socially, culturally, gender, at the workplace etc) if I had to come back to this world again and again, I’d always want to come back as a woman, because I like the femininity and nurturing aspects of being a woman.

But recently, that statement has felt a bit more complicated and nuanced. Reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini caused the shift. It exposed me to the lives of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, where being female meant pain, silence, invisibility, violence, being possessed and amongst other atrocious things.

I started asking myself these questions: Would I still make bold declarations like “I would rather be a woman” if I were born in a place where womanhood meant suffering, not freedom? Would I trade the “ease” of being a man in a place like Afghanistan, for unimaginable terrors and non-humanness of being a woman?

I was humbled. I realised my privilege. Most importantly, I realised that all our perspectives are circumstantial; circumstantial and contextual. What we believe about ourselves and the world is almost always shaped by where we stand, the experiences we have had, the families we were born into, the parts of the world we live in, etc, not by any universal truth.

We go about life with such certainty about what we can and can't do, so sure of ourselves, when we can only see within one dimension, when we are in fact, amorphous things that only take up the shape of our “containers”

Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren speaks to the fluidity of self:
“In the phrase [“to find myself”] lurks the idea that the self is a pre-existing entity, a self like a Platonic idea existing in a mystic realm beyond time and change. No, rather an object like a nugget of gold in the placer pan, the Easter egg under the bush at an Easter-egg hunt, a four-leaf clover to promise miraculous luck. Here is the essence of passivity, one’s quintessential luck. And the essence of absurdity, too, for the self is never to be found, but must be created, not the happy accident of passivity, but the product of a thousand actions, large and small, conscious or unconscious, performed not “away from it all,” but in the face of “it all,” for better or for worse, in work and leisure rather than in free time.”......

“The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process of a healthy society itself”

To fully know ourselves(there is no such thing to be honest, because we keep unveiling parts of us as we expose ourselves to new things, and people and ideas and environments), so to rephrase, as we journey towards self-discovery, we must constantly expose ourselves to different realities. Books, conversations, travel, and listening deeply to stories different from ours. This is how we expand who we are and our worldviews. They break down our “illusion” that our view of the world is complete or even accurate, or all there is.

“Therefore let anyone who thinks he stands(who feels sure that he has a steadfast mind and standing firm) take heed lest he falls”- 1st Corinthians 10:12.

Self-discovery, in addition to being an internal work, it’s about looking outward and allowing what we see, the people we interact with, to reshape who we are.

It’s a lifelong feedback mechanism of constantly questioning what we believe, why we believe it, and allowing ourselves to be humbled, surprised, moved, and changed by these interactions. Looking at the good parts of ourselves and the not-so-good parts.

So, would I still choose to be a woman? The answer now is “it depends”. That's the type of uncomfortable honesty and lack of arrogance I’m prepared to start pursuing, because that’s how I grow and evolve.

Keep going,

Ije,