A Year of Unlearning

For the longest time, I believed gender was something stable. Something you are given, like a name, and then expected to carry without question. It lived quietly in everyday instructions. Sit like this. Speak like that. Don’t laugh too loudly. Don’t take up too much space. Dream, but not too far. Fear, but silently. I followed these rules without ever recognizing them as rules.

This year unsettled that certainty.

It began slowly. Sitting with women and girls in small rooms, under fans that barely moved the air, listening to stories that did not sound like theories but like lived weight. There was always a hesitation before speaking. Not silence, but something heavier. A measuring of consequences. A young girl once said she wanted to study further, and then almost immediately corrected herself, “if my family allows.” The sentence was complete, but it carried an invisible boundary.

That boundary started appearing everywhere.

In the way women laughed with their hands covering their mouths. In the way decisions were framed as permissions. In the way anger was swallowed and renamed as patience. I began to see that identity was not simply who someone is, but what they have been allowed to become.

This is where my understanding of feminism began to change.

I had earlier understood it as a demand for equality. A rightful demand, but still operating within the same frame. Over time, it started to feel like feminism was asking a more uncomfortable question. Not just why women do not have equal access, but why these categories exist in such rigid forms at all. Why must there be a fixed way to be a woman or a man. Who decided this, and why does it feel so natural that we rarely question it.

In the field, I saw resistance, but it did not always look the way I expected.

Sometimes it was loud. A woman refusing a decision, a girl insisting on continuing her education, a voice that did not lower itself when interrupted. More often, it was quiet. A delayed marriage. A small saving hidden away. A daughter being told, gently, that she could choose differently. These acts did not announce themselves as rebellion, but they shifted something real.

And then there were moments that stayed with me the longest.

Women reinforcing the same limits that constrained them. A mother advising her daughter to adjust. A sister suggesting silence over conflict. At first, it felt like contradiction. Later, it began to feel like inheritance. When the world is structured in a certain way, survival often requires learning its language. Compliance is not always agreement. Sometimes it is protection.

Somewhere in the middle of observing all this, the gaze turned inward.

I started noticing myself more carefully. The way my voice changed depending on who I was speaking to. The way I softened statements so they would be received better. The way I balanced strength with likability, as if the two could not exist together without negotiation. None of this felt deliberate, and that is what made it more unsettling. These were not choices I was actively making. They were patterns I had absorbed.

That realization did not come as a moment of clarity. It came with discomfort.

If so much of what I considered natural was actually learned, then what did authenticity even mean. Where did I end and where did expectation begin. But within that discomfort, there was also a quiet opening. If these patterns were learned, they could also be unlearned. Not easily, not completely, but consciously.

This journey has not given me clean answers. It has made things more complex. It has made me pause more often. To sit with moments that earlier passed without notice. To ask, gently but persistently, why something feels normal.

I have come to understand that subversion is not always dramatic.

Sometimes it is a pause before agreeing. Sometimes it is a question that disrupts a familiar statement. Sometimes it is choosing not to laugh at something that everyone else accepts. Sometimes it is allowing yourself to feel something you were taught to suppress.

These shifts are small, but they accumulate. They change the texture of everyday life. Over this year, feminism has become less of a concept and more of a practice. Not something I hold, but something I do. In conversations, in silences, in the way I listen, and in the way I respond. And identity has become less fixed, more fluid. Something shaped by forces outside of us, but not entirely owned by them.

This is not a conclusion. It is a moment of noticing.

A recognition that much of what feels natural has been constructed. And that within that construction, there is always a possibility, however small, to shift, to question, and to become differently. Maybe change does not begin with certainty. Maybe it begins with the refusal to accept everything as given.