what was i made for?

and other existential questions i have

The other day I started sobbing while listening to the Barbie movie soundtrack, which as it turns out, is not an original experience.

As I listened to Billie Eilish longingly ask “what was I made for”? I found myself filed with inescapable grief about the woman I would be if I hadn’t been born in patriarchy. My brain immediately went into an Everything, Everywhere, all At Once montage of all the parallel universes and lives that I could have lived, all the personality traits I could have developed, the choices I would have made, and most importantly the woman that I could have been, but that I will probably never get to meet.

And as we’ve discussed before, the pain of losing something you know, can be worse than the pain of losing something you never had. It had me thinking, could existing inside patriarchy result in a form of ambiguous loss?

It’s hard to assess the damage of something you can’t grasp. Like, if I hadn’t been born into a system that consistently undermines my own authority, what decisions would I have made differently? I’m not even talking about the big ones, but the tiny ones too. Would I have the same favorite color? Would I like the same food? How would my voice sound if it had never been silenced?