u/Abject_Profit_7936

I hate being a woman. I hate my body, my breasts, my face, makeup, dresses, skirts, bras etc. I hate periods, pregnancy, childbirth, thought of being a mother and wife. I hate being only seen as a body and only complimented on my body.

Hate always having to walk on eggshells and keep an eye on my surroundings. I hate everything us women have to suffer with. I hate how no matter what we do, we’re criticized - too feminine, not feminine enough, too emotional, too cold, too loud, too quiet.

I hate how our value is so often measured by beauty, youth, desirability, and what we can do for everyone else. I hate how pain gets normalized and how we’re expected to endure it in silence. I hate how unsafe the world can feel, how we have to think twice about things others never even consider.

I hate how so many dreams get overshadowed by expectations of marriage, motherhood, and roles we may never have wanted. I hate how exhausting it is to constantly fight to be seen as a full human being instead of a body, a stereotype, or a role to fill. I hate carrying anger, sadness, and resentment over something I never even chose.

And you know what, that’s not even the half of it.

Before a woman speaks, the world has already formed an opinion about her.

From childhood, the message is consistent: how you look matters, how you act matters, how likable you are matters. Not in the way it matters for everyone. In a way that is specifically, relentlessly, about you. Your body. Your tone. Your choices. Your boundaries. These become public property in a way that is so normalized it takes years to recognize as strange.

The expectations are designed to be impossible. Be beautiful, but not vain. Confident, but not intimidating. Strong, but make everyone comfortable. Chase success, but carry the emotional labor, the caregiving, the invisible maintenance of other people's lives … and do it without complaint, and make it look effortless, and if you can't, try harder.

Underneath all of it runs a quieter current: the feeling of never quite being enough. Not productive enough. Not attractive enough. Not kind enough. Not calm enough when you're upset, or warm enough when you're tired. Women learn to edit themselves constantly. Personality, appearance, volume. Just to move through the world without friction. It becomes second nature. That's what makes it so exhausting. You stop noticing how much energy it costs.

There are fears, too, that many people never have to learn. Walking to your car at night with your keys arranged a certain way. Sharing your location before you leave. Being polite to someone who makes your skin crawl because you've learned that rejection can be dangerous. Watching your drink. Memorizing exits. These habits develop quietly, practically in childhood, and they stay. Most women don't think of them as fear anymore. They just think of them as sense.

And when something does happen … harassment, assault, dismissal … the response so often turns the question back on the woman. What were you wearing? Are you sure? Why didn't you say something sooner? The burden lands where it was never supposed to be, and the woman carries that too.

Healthcare does the same thing. Pain minimized. Symptoms waved off as anxiety or hormones or sensitivity. Women have spent decades being undertreated in the very spaces designed to care for them, learning to advocate loudly for themselves just to be heard at a baseline level. Many know the specific humiliation of describing real pain to someone who is already formulating a dismissal.

In relationships, women are often expected to give without account. To nurture, forgive, stabilize, communicate perfectly, absorb conflict, and ask for nothing in return. When a woman finally stops doing this, when she draws a line or says enough, the language around her shifts. Suddenly she is difficult. Cold. Changed. As though her purpose was the giving, and the person beneath it was optional.

Mothers are judged regardless of what they choose. So are women without children. So are women who work too much, women who stay home, women who age, women who don't. The scrutiny doesn't attach to a particular choice … it attaches to the fact of being a woman making one.

None of this is felt uniformly. Race, class, disability, sexuality … all of it shapes how these pressures land and how heavily. But most women carry some version of this weight, and it accumulates in ways that are genuinely hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived it. Not because it's mysterious, but because each piece seems small until you try to put it down and realize you never could.

What is remarkable is not that women struggle under it. It's that most continue anyway. Rebuilding after loss. Showing up after exhaustion. Leading, creating, protecting, loving in systems that were not designed to make any of it easy.

That's not a compliment meant to soften what's hard. It's just true. And the fight for safety, for healthcare, for equal treatment, for the basic right to exist without negotiation is not finished. It has simply been going on long enough that some people have mistaken endurance for ease.