I Am a Woman

Killeen Reidy

I am a woman, though my awareness of that fluctuates. What a sad thing that I never felt more like a woman than when I was harassed for a year straight. A year of thinking it was the final no, that finally he would move on and understand I wasn’t interested. Months of hidden harassment over text.

“I had a dream about you.” 

“I love you.” 

“Please respond.” 

“If you don’t respond I’ll kill myself.” 

“I’m a bad friend, I’m sorry.” 

To this day it is still one of the most terrifying times of my life. 

I am a woman. It is something that has shaped me my entire life, often without my consent. I have been harmed and witnessed harm. I knew of at least three of my peers who were sexually abused and/or assaulted before I even graduated high school. 

The gravel digs into the back of my thighs. Everything seemed fine just seconds ago. But she’s crying, she’s crying, she’s crying. I am powerless to do anything but join her. To hold her, like that would make what happened any less overwhelming. 

I had to interact with their abusers, day after day. 

He was right there, sitting as if nothing had happened. All I could do was grit my teeth and imagine new and exciting ways to ruin him, to harm him. It didn’t stop the helplessness.

I had to interact with my own. 

“Well you know he’s always had problems with you.” I want to scream and yell and hit something. She knew. She knew. Yet even though she said she wanted us to have a safe space, she had decided my safety wasn’t as important as his.

I watch as even now this number seems to grow.

***

I am a woman not because it is how I feel internally but because of how men have treated me and the woman I love. It may seem a strange and demoralizing way of looking at womanhood—a hat I put on and take off depending on the world around me, yet I can’t put it away. I have tried. For a period, I declared myself outside of the binary. I was feminine, but not. Woman adjacent. I still felt like I was a girl. I was not confined by my society’s expectation of a woman. “She” was okay, but “they” was new and thrilling. I was AFAB, just simply assigned female and raised as a girl.

Yet womanhood isn’t always something you claim. It is about expectations. About choice. About struggle. It’s not something to be claimed lightly, nor is it a small label to carry. It has the millions of women’s voices that were silenced, that were harmed, that are still struggling, that are triumphing, that are simply alive because that is hard enough as a woman. 

According to the World Economic Forum, six women are killed every hour by men around the world, most by men in their own family or their partners.

It is something I carry with me as I choose to live as a woman, an act of defiance in a world that expects too much.

I am a woman not in spite of the hardships I have faced but because of them. Womanhood is not about a binary system, despite what some may tell you. It is about being strong and vulnerable, soft and stern, protector and victim. I am not just one or the other, I am all of these things and more. 

I am a woman.

A b o u t

Killeen Reidy is a second-year student at Eastern Illinois University, studying English with a Cultural and Literary Studies focus and minoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As a child she dreamed of writing epic fantasy novels, but now she writes mostly to understand herself and the world around her. “I Am a Woman” is her first published work.