There’s a script handed down to young girls — sometimes in spoken word, with meanings often implied. From here, graduating from girlhood meant we could read between the lines.

To be a woman, now, is to scream through bodies of paragraphs — because when our own bodies have been made so accessible, our (his)tory is being written in braille.

But what if womanhood was not a cautionary tale?

Becoming a woman should be an unfolding of the self — a story that owes no apology, or explanation. Evolving chapters that reveal we are acting in, not out of character.

Becoming a woman is owning a legacy that speaks for us, because we chose to speak for ourselves — to express without exposure, and to show softness without surrender.

Womanhood, here, is a quiet return to ourselves — untouched — not by “impurity”, but by the pressure to perform. In our becoming, we start to sense the intuition we’ve always held backstage — a pull between showing up for ourselves and putting on a show.

Womanhood isn’t earned through suffering, but sovereignty. To become a woman is to drop our armour — lowering our guards to kneel so we can tend to our flowers. Here, we become caretakers of our experience, rather than keepers of composure. Our measure of growth becomes less about the blood we’ve shed, and more about the grace we’ve learned to carry in its wake — contractions, cravings, consciousness and all.

Finally, womanhood arrives like a birthday with no due date, with a card to the future they planned for us, that reads: “we’re no longer expecting”.

And so, the becoming of a woman begins — with less bracing, and more blooming. Let us resist the urge to tidy our mess into moral code, our complexities into caution signs, and our scars into scripture.

To become a woman, we were raised to resist. But we become women when we also learn to release.

That’s why becoming a woman is not about a milestone, but a moment.

Becoming a woman was never about performance, but our pulse.

And while it takes one to know one, becoming this woman does not come with a warning.

But a witness.