Awfully greedy

Working towards an IWD event with the @shesays.singapore ladies and I pondered a lot about this year’s theme #BreakTheBias. I was tasked with a one-liner but alas, even though I’m Greek, I’m not laconic.

In all seriousness, I was reading up on how to break biases and how damn tough it can be, because how the hell are you gonna break something if you don’t know that it’s there in the first place? Women were encouraging other women (and men) to examine their blind spots and start from their own assumptions first and I thought about how true that rings.

Not just the fact that to affect change, you must start with yourself first and foremost but also the fact that my own thoughts had been biased for a long time and they filtered my perceptions of other women (and men too). And how it took an equally long time to unlearn and how I still have an even longer way to go.

I enjoyed seeing a series of illustrations not too long ago that was challenging notions of success and how our perspective is fixed on one narrative — to be empowered, fulfilled, accomplished as a woman, the life vision has already been prescribed: a boss lady, a mum, a married career woman with a walk-in closet (preferably with adorable kids, interesting hobbies and philanthropic instincts).

My mum said something to me the other day to that effect and it struck a chord. She described her friend’s new daughter in law and said that she was in ‘the same category’ as me. I was puzzled. I asked her what that category was. “You know”, she said, “a career woman — not one to care about the household, do the cooking and all.” Now, my mum was the main bread-earner when we were growing up and her career defined most of her life — while being a bad ass cook and a GREAT mum at the same time — and I’m 150% she meant nothing negative about this ‘categorisation’. But sadly I recognise it all too well from the cultural expectations that are so enmeshed with growing up as a girl, and especially a girl in a relatively poor suburb of Athens.

I recognise the biases I submitted myself and judged others by for so long too. Seeing life as a binary choice — I can be smart or I can be pretty, I can be someone who finds purpose at work or someone who finds purpose at home, I can be polite and diplomatic or I can be opinionated and bossy, I can be frugal or materialistic. No spectrums, no dialectics — choosing or being prescribed one means you’re automatically being excluded from the other.

I get annoyed at myself when I realise how much time I lost trying to stick to my own assumptions of what I was supposed to be like. How much time I wasted not enjoying my own body and being active in it because I thought I wasn’t built for it. How long I told myself it wasn’t a big deal I wanted certain things at work because god forbid I accepted I wanted to ‘drive’ and what would it mean if people thought I wasn’t agreeable.

I started recognising myself in Simone de Beauvoir’s words at some point: “ I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish…” I’ve always loved how much this quote holds inside but it took me a while to figure out it actually doesn’t mean I am greedy — it means I’m just myself and I need to make space for all the parts of me. And in turn, to allow others around me to do the same. Happy International Women’s Day. Go forth and #breakthebias