Becoming The Woman I'm Meant To Be
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”
- Simone de Beauvoir
When I was called to return to Toronto in 2017, after years of off-and-on travels, I knew intuitively that one of the reasons was that it was time to “grow up.”
I don’t mean grow up in the sense of “settling down”: getting a stable job, acquiring a mortgage and producing 2.5 kids. You can do all of those things but still inside not have grown into an adult.
I was aware, through the women and men I had met on my travels, that I thought of myself as a girl finding her way in the world. In fact, part of the appeal of my brand was that I was a young woman (girl?) and I exemplified and embodied the part in all of that wants to be a free-spirited archetypical innocent girl travelling the world. I was Moana.
However, I was also aware that at some point, I’d have to figure out it would mean to be a woman, not a girl.
Girl vs. Woman
While there are a lot of advantages to being a girl, there were also disadvantages. I could tell that I lived on shifting sand. There were so many things that I wanted to be and do, and I was desperate to do them all, all in my twenties. That meant I counted the weeks, months and years of my twenties very carefully. If one route in life didn’t work, I’d switch very quickly, and travel allowed me to jump in and out of different situations quickly. There were a certain number of things that I wanted to see and do in life, and I had limited time!
I lacked the clarity and quiet assurance that I saw in the woman in my life. They weren’t trying to become someone else or some thing, they seemed to live in themselves. I was trying on different selves. This time of exploration and discovery was crucial to my growth, and I don’t regret a moment of my travels, but I was always aware that, one day, I’d have to grow beyond it.
This August will mark four years in the city, in the suburbs of Toronto, living under the same roofs, driving through the same neighbourhoods and seeing the same people for work.
With the slow passage of time, I am able now to look back and see how Life and God are helping me to become a woman, ushering me into the embodiment of the woman I am meant to be.
The Woman I Am Meant To Be
There are multiple aspects of womanhood, and I’m in the process of outlining and clarifying all of them, but I’ll start here with two aspects that stand out for me: a woman’s work and a woman’s body.
A Woman Who Works
Within months of arriving in Toronto, I landed a job as a “Junior Website Graphics Designer.” At first, I loved it and my days at work with saturated in this atmosphere of hope and gratitude. I embraced this new chapter of working with a creative team, driving to an office and trying out life in the “ordinary lane.” At 27 years old, I had no idea what it would be like to work at a consistent full-time job for more than 3 months, so this was my current adventure, or so I told myself.
Within six months, I realized that this was not going to be a proverbial “dream job.” There would be projects that I didn’t want to work on, days where I felt like I was wasting my talents, and days where the ideas I pitched went nowhere.
This job did not exist to be my personal creative outlet. It was a company that I worked for. Still, I persevered, challenging myself to stick this out. I would know when it was time to leave and I wanted to stay for a minimum of 2-3 years.
Throughout the years at this job, I’ve often felt like God included that word ‘Junior’ in my job title just to humble me. I couldn’t even brag about my job title. I was at very the bottom of the pack and bottom on the pay scale. While there was no glory, there was a lot of God and growth in the job.
Last month, God finally brought me a different job opportunity, one that draws me deeper into womanhood. As I’ve thought about what being a woman means in relation to paid, structured employment, I’ve come to believe that God already knows the next best move for our careers.
There are still jobs and roles in society that I feel I’m supposed to complete. I have an inner knowing that there is more for me, but just not yet. I have to wait and live through what’s been given to me, one job at a time.
For example, I still believe that I’m supposed to be a documentary filmmaker. However, the particular route I’m taking right now (a solo travelling content creator, turned church graphic designer, turned *new job I will tell you about soon*) is not exactly the express lane to being a documentary filmmaker.
But what do I know about how to become a filmmaker?
What if there is still plenty of time?
Who says I won’t still end up being a filmmaker in 10 years? What if the zig-zagging nature of my career path so far is somehow preparing me for the day that I zig-zag into my role as a documentary filmmaker? Plus, being a filmmaker is only one of the things I feel called to do.
What if I need to zig-zag into other roles before I’m destined to become a filmmaker.
So for me, being a woman means having a deep clarity about who I’m supposed to be and what I’m here to create in the world while being flexible about the specific route to getting there.
I have a sense of my destiny, but I am even more certain in the One who leads me forward.
In my twenties, I grasped for the perfect job and wouldn’t settle for anything less than the specific thing I wanted to do, (aka. travelling the world and making meaningful content NOW, right NOW). The 30-year-old Anita is willing to wait, patiently, and gratefully for the jobs to come to me on their own, according to God’s design.
I recognize now that even if I tried to map out the trajectory from my current situation to a life where I am doing all the things I want to do, I couldn’t do it.
If I tried to finagle every twist and turn to control the outcome, I would probably screw up the exact route God is already working out for me. I trust that something bigger and mightier is leading the way for me.
A woman & her Body
For me, a woman is someone who can see the beauty in herself: she owns her own beauty while also being able to genuinely acknowledge the beauty in others.
This is one I’m still working on. I am one of those people who has always wished I was 10 lbs. lighter, and I’m certainly not alone in this.
However, the women in my life who I admire and cherish never comment on hating their bodies. They have a certainty that this is just the size of their body right now.
When I turned 30, I had a few weeks where I freaked out that now my metabolism would slow down and I would get fatter without trying. This anxiety bubbled up out of nowhere and I knew it was coming to show me something.
Over the years, I’ve already learned that trying to will and starve my body into submission does not work, at all. It actually has a deeply harmful effect in the long-term as it puts me at war with my body and I know that my body will settle into its ideal shape when I live in utmost harmony.
My body is a physical manifestation of what’s going on in my mind and spirit. When all of me is working in sync, then my body will operate at its optimal state. I believe my body knows how to find and lead me to its own equilibrium. Forcing diets on my body will just mess up the equilibrium.
I’ve chosen to look at the era ahead as one where I get to learn how to really cherish, nourish and nurture my body.
I do not want to work at the expense of my body (working 12+ hours a day to create content), and I do not want to obsess about my body at the expense of my work and relationships (spending 3+ hours at the gym, leaving me with less mental energy for other things). There is a balance that must be found, and this is what I will get to uncover in the years ahead. This actually makes me excited to grow into my 30’s!
Imagine what it would feel like to be centred, grounded in our bodies and radiating an honest beauty?
A Word About That “Ideal Body”
While I was obsessing about my metabolism in my 30’s recently, I went to that place where I kept saying to myself, “I’m supposed to be a little thinner. A little more fit.”
Obviously, my idea of a healthy, “beautiful” body is skewed by what we see in the media.
I know this intimately, having been fixated on how advertising makes us want abnormal things since I was in seventh grade.
So as much as I tried to convince myself that I’m actually a healthy body weight and that my body is just fine, I felt a deeper truth merge.
When I let the voice that was stressing about metabolism quiet down, and waited for the voice of Truth, that inner wisdom of God to bubble up, I heard something different than what I expected.
“What if you’re longing for beauty is actually a sign of the woman you are meant to be?”
“What if the same knowing that I’m supposed to be a filmmaker, is the same knowing that, as a fully-blossomed woman, I would actually be more beautiful?”
As I live and work in my soul purpose, as I walk through these years from a woman her thirties to a woman in her forties, my body would ideally settle into who she is meant to be.
This includes my body shape, but also how I dress, how I do my hair, and how I cultivate and nourish my one earthsuit for this lifetime.
Just as my career, the series of paid jobs, is a God-ordained track that is leading towards the “fully-blossomed Anita,” so my journey of learning to take care of my body well is leading towards the blossomed Anita’s body.
(Also I’m aware that as a creative and artist, I have an eye tuned to what makes something beautiful, so I’m aware that I’m applying this same eye to my body. My body can be a work of art too, and that is not such a bad thing. It might even be a good thing. It’s just not the sole focus of my life. It’s one piece of the puzzle of my fully-blossomed identity.)
Now, when I feel hopeful that one day I will fit into that one pair of shorts that I adore, I don’t feel bad. I don’t that it’s wishful thinking. I feel that it’s a deep longing from my soul to remember who I came here to be.
If my soul told me to let the shorts go and embrace my body shape now, because this is the way I’m meant to be, I would do that. But actually, I sense God telling me, keep reaching. There is more I made you for.
But I don’t reach like my 20’s self, the one who tried to grab and hold onto tightly. I reach gently, trusting that the results, which might take months or years to come to fruition, will indeed come.
Growing Into Womanhood
In general, the process that is happening to me right now is this:
Something bothers me ( like the cobwebs in the closet, disorganized shelves, my clothes don’t feel right, etc.)
I start to become more and more clear of how I want to feel and who I’m supposed to be. (Perhaps because my own vibration is aligning into womanhood, parts of me are changing to match it.)
Then, one piece at a time, I start tweaking and refining aspects of my life. (How I eat, dress, email, walk, talk, plan, etc. Every aspect of my life is undergoing this process!)
I live, listen and refine. It’s not about the final result, it’s the process of change.
I call it recalibrating, or re-aligning. If June was about regenerating, then July and August must be about recalibrating or re-aligning.
This isn’t something I’m controlling so much as it’s just happening to me, and it feels right.
Ok, that’s it for today. :) Thank you for reading!
Infinite Love,
Anita
