Before She Found Herself, She Found Everyone Else
Notes from Soweto
There is a story I have witnessed over and over again in many Black communities. It begins with a little girl she learns to greet elders respectfully. She learns to cook and clean basically to take care of the chores. She learns that one day she will become someone’s wife. Someone’s daughter-in-law and someone's mother. Someone’s church leader, community woman. She is taught how to care for everyone around her.
What she is rarely taught is how to know herself.
By the time she finishes matric, life moves quickly. Perhaps she falls in love if she’s fortunate lobola paid. After lobola she moves in to stay with her husband . Perhaps children arrive. Lets assume she is married to a working and able man then they have a new house not living with the in-laws. Perhaps she joins her husband’s church because that is what the family does. Responsibilities replace curiosity and years become routines. She becomes known as a good makoti. A good wife and good mother a very dependable woman. Everyone knows who she is in relation to other people.
Few know who she is for herself.
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Then something happens. For many women it arrives quietly somewhere between thirty-five and forty. Not a crisis but an awakening. A question begins to whisper louder every year.
Who am I?
Not whose wife am I? Not whose mother am I. Not whose daughter-in-law am I.
Who am I when all the roles are stripped away? Sometimes the answers make people uncomfortable. The woman wants to study. She wants to travel. She wants to heal from all the marital challenges or overwhelming survival mode she's been living in. She wants to start a business. She wants to explore the spiritual calling she might have ignored for years. She begins questioning traditions she followed without ever choosing them herself. Suddenly the family says she has changed. That she has become difficult or rebellious. But perhaps she is not becoming rebellious. Perhaps she is becoming visible. Maybe the woman everyone calls “changed” is simply meeting herself for the first time.
This is not a rejection of marriage.
It is not a rejection of family. It is not a rejection of culture. It is an invitation to ask whether women can honor those things without disappearing inside them. Because a woman who has lost herself cannot fully give herself. And a woman who finds herself does not become less valuable to her family. She becomes whole. That is the journey I want to explore.
Not the story of one woman. But the stories of many women whose lives have quietly asked the same question:
Who was I before the world decided who I should become?
