I Was You

FIRST PUBLISHED 24th MARCH 2026

Everyone says you look just like me.
Let me tell you what that means.

They were choosing your colour
before you had even arrived.

Here is your doll.
Here is your kitchen.
You will learn to be good.
To swallow it. To smile anyway.

And one day a much older man
will tell you you're so mature for your age.
And part of you will feel proud.
That's the part that breaks my heart.

You will measure yourself in the eyes of men
and not know yet
that the world taught you to need that.
You don't.

Smile, love.
Not like that.

You will bleed and it will be shameful.
You won't bleed and it will be terrifying.

You will fight your way to the table
and the day you have a baby
it will empty quietly behind you.
They will call it natural.

You will become the keeper of everything.
Appointments. Permission slips. Packed lunches.
Nobody will ask what you filed away to make room for it.

You will be tired in a way that has no name.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it
they will trial a male contraceptive pill
and halt it because of mood swings.
You will laugh.
It will not be a happy laugh.

Then the fire.
The years the doctor calls anxiety.
The years you grow old and it is unforgivable.

But there is another side to it.
I promise you there is another side.

The moment the noise finally drops away.
The moment you see the whole machine clearly,
every cog and lever,
who it was built for,
who it has ground down
generation after generation
and kept going anyway.

You will know your own mind like you never have before.
Need their approval less than you ever thought possible.

It took me almost fifty years.
I hope it takes you less.

But it becomes yours.
Completely yours.

And I know that right now
you are standing in front of the mirror
with your skirt hiked up
and your face full of makeup you don't need
and you are lit up about boys.

You know everything I have told you.
We made sure you knew.
Tried to hold the door against it
for as long as we could.

But it doesn't come through the door.
It comes through everything else.
Friends and screens and shops and songs
and a thousand tiny messages a day
seeping in like water through a membrane.
Slow and certain and unstoppable.

And if I push you push back
and end up further in
so I am learning to stand here
and watch
and trust that what I planted is still growing
somewhere underneath it all.

You have nodded along to all of it.
I can see you listening.
I can see you not hearing me.
Not yet.

I know.
I was you.

And I know where it gets you.
Not because you are careless
or naive
or any of the things they will imply
when it happens.
But because you are young
and the world knows exactly where young women are soft
and it presses there.
I just wish I could stand between you and it.
I can't.
That's the part that keeps me up at night.

And one day, when the noise finally drops away,
you will stand where I am standing
and you will understand every word.
I just can't make it come sooner.
That's the cruellest part.
That's always been the cruellest part.

♀

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