Feeling trapped and owned by – family, partner, husband, society, culture, religion, country – is something to see in yourself as a woman. It plays itself out very subtly but powerfully. In feeling trapped or owned by, you’re not your own, you don’t belong to yourself. You’re someone else’s prior to belonging to yourself. And this feels suffocating for its a limitation that had long ago been imposed on your own sovereignty, your own potentiality and possibility.
When you’re born into this world as a girl, you are treated differently from the start. The family, the parents have a different flavor of ownership over you compared to that of a boy. That ownership is beyond just a parent – child dynamic, it’s a parent/ society/ culture / religion – girl dynamic. There’s a sense of property to it. A sense of we own you. Your movements, your potential is determined by us. You’re within our constraints.
Whereas a boy in being male has inherently more open-ended potentiality. It’s encouraged in him that he can be all that he wants to be. Comparatively. There’s no sense of being constrained or tamed the same way a girl is. Perhaps in other ways, this freedom is not fully true but there’s a world of a difference between the parent-boy and parent-girl dynamic.
This is something to see and acknowledge for yourself as a woman. That this feeling of life being just outside you, just beyond your grasp, is a symptom of this being owned by dynamic. And some women are happy to stay in the confines of that. They like it actually. There’s a ‘safety’ in that for them. “Being the girl.”
But other women have wildness in their blood. They can’t stomach this type of thing. And the feeling sense of that wildness is an intolerance to this kind of entrapment – a sensitivity to it. Like being lactose intolerant, it’s almost like an allergic reaction. Feeling suffocated is one of the symptoms of this allergic reaction. Suffocated by any sense or feel of this limitation no matter how subtle.
The playing out of this happened while growing up to solidify that this is in fact ‘your reality as a girl‘. The limitations imposed on you in your childhood and adolescence where you couldn’t really have a life outside of the family. Unless in secret or in hiding or as an act of complete rebellion which was seen as intolerable for the family.
Not having any sense of agency to make something happen for yourself outside the confines of family was a very real limitation that was felt and imbibed in your system. Friends were replaceable, your own interests and hobbies were negligible; child’s play – not serious, not real. Your feelings about what you wanted to study or pursue were unimportant, completely neglected as kind of a luxury type of thinking. Your life was not your own and the idea of it being your own was considered frivolous thinking.
This outside treatment of you was then internalized. You started neglecting your needs, your wants, you didn’t even know what you want because it didn’t matter. Your focus became on others, their lives being the primary lives, yours secondary to their lives. And you became a kind of burden in that way. Somebody the primary folk had to take care of begrudgingly. And so this is what is playing out in you right now.
And any possibility that presented an opportunity just for you on your terms became out of the question. Not just for them but for you. This is where self destructive behavior comes in. When you yourself actively and unconsciously sabotage your own potential. Because it hurts too much. It goes against so much in you. That the sabotage is a kind of ointment to that hurt. ‘It’s not possible anyway, so I might as well stop trying’. Things will always be just beyond my reach. It’s for others, who come from first world countries and have parents who understand and support them. But me, no.
The opposite of which is complete rebellion. Trying to prove something to them. To the family, to the husband, to society. See? I am worth something… But there is violence in this kind of rebellion. Because it tries to overpower by denying what’s there. The fear, the hurt, the worthlessness. It tries to gain a sense of agency by annihilating the powerlessness and limitation that is felt and imbibed in the system. From years of your own conditioning maybe even ancestral or collective.
So no wonder you want to escape, you want to grasp at something beyond this imprisonment, beyond this self-neglect, beyond living as a secondary character in your own life.
Accept that this is so in you. Stop trying to fix it or change it. Bring kindness towards it. Bring kindness towards the fearful one in you who had no choice in all this. This is the environment she was brought up in. This is the reality of what’s playing out in you. Don’t deny it, don’t try to overpower it by being ‘strong’ or overcoming it. Be gentle and kind towards it, be willing to suffer it, in other words, be open to it – don’t reject it.