Becoming The Woman I'm Meant To Be: Part 2

Sunrise in the countryside in Southern Ontario.

This is a moment I don’t want to miss.

Becoming a woman is much more subtle than becoming a mother. You don’t have to do the public affairs: announcing the change to your family, your social media, your boss. 

Instead, somewhere between age 18 and 40, people simply stop calling you a girl, and start calling you a lady, or a woman. 

I’ve been thinking about what it means to turn 30 since my 29th birthday. Every couple of days for the last year and a half, my mind would circle back to this topic. What is my life going to look like, for the rest of my life? What does it mean for me to ‘grow up’? I wrote a few blogs about it, but it never felt like enough. I had questions that kept percolating and I could see that nothing in my normal life would answer them. 

The women I knew who in my life who were older than me weren’t going to share any nuggets on growing older and wiser, at least not without my prompting. There would be no words or rituals to help me honour and recognize this liminal transition from girlhood to womanhood. There would be no party, no cupcakes, no photos, no well wishes on social media.   I was fine without the public fanfare; I knew that something important was going in the depths of my soul. 

I would need to find the answers to my questions about becoming a woman on my own. What started out as a little nudge in my spirit that I couldn’t shake has become the outline for my metamorphosis.

Somewhere between being 29 and now, 6 months into my 30’s, I crossed a threshold. 

I now see myself as a woman in the world. Perhaps a new woman, not a seasoned woman, but a woman nonetheless. 

Taking Responsibility

For me, the most prominent quality of being a woman, the one that leads to the visible offshoots, like how I might dress, talk or work, is a deeper sense of responsibility.  A woman is someone who takes responsibility for these three domains of her life: herself, those around her and her world. 

Responsibility For Yourself

A woman is someone who knows how to take care of herself, body, mind and soul. 

I thought I knew how to take care of myself, as a twenty-something who could travel the world out of one suitcase for months at a time, but my life in the city is showing that there is a lot more to learn. While I enjoy keeping my stuff in a minimum, there is also a role and a place for material things, especially tools, equipment and things with sentimental value. 

Responsibility for myself also includes how I use my time, how I use my money, how I steward my relationships and friendships. It means I no longer blame my parents or western culture or capitalism. Everything in my life, be it physical or not, is here for a reason and part my job as a woman is to understand what it’s here for and embrace it’s purpose. 

When it comes to my body, I’m learning to take care of my it and listen to it’s wisdom in a way that I never had before. I started waking up at 5am in 2018 and at first, it was more like an experiment to see if I could be more productive. Little by little, it’s become a part of who I am. Maybe I don’t need 8 or 9 hours of sleep every night to feel rested.  I’ve come to trust my instincts about my personal sleeping and waking schedule. Being a woman means that I don’t need to let other people tell me how I should or shouldn’t treat my body. I can take in ideas and insights, but ultimately filter them through what my own body needs and desires. 

Responsibility For My Relationships

How am I relating to my family? How am I relating to my friends? Am I investing in the friendships that I want to sustain and grow? How am I relating to my workplace and coworkers? 

Being a woman means that I consciously navigate these navigate these relationships, instead of living on autopilot. I don’t ignore my family, like I used to when I was in twenties, but I also don’t let them define me. I’m also learning what it means to be an adult friend. Obviously being friends with adults and other women is different from how it was when I was a student. No one teaches us how to be a good and true friend, but it’s something that I know that I want to be good at. Maintaining and growing meaningful adult friendships takes intention, time and care; it won’t happen automatically.

Responsibility for the World

I feel a sense of responsibility to use my one life in a way that will make the world better, kinder, more beautiful. This is what compels me to be super vigilant with how I spend my time and energy. As I look back in these years of becoming more and more deliberate about my life, I can see the compound effect of caring about my time. The more I care about my time, the more intentional I use it. The more I care about the world, the more I try to make decisions that consider everyone involved: myself, my relationships and my world. 

I’m learning to take my work seriously. There is a greater sense of responsibility in how I produce and manage my workload, in my employed jobs but also in the coursework for my masters program, and my personal creative projects. I have a limited time here on earth and I might not get to do everything I want, so what is important enough for me to actually do?

I believe that seeing one’s life through these three lenses of responsibilityis a sign that I’m ‘growing up’. I’m growing into the shoes that I am here to fill. I am remembering who I cam be to be, what I came to do. I’m learning to trust in my limitations and in my innate gifts. I cannot do everything, but if I do the right things, if I let myself blossom, I can fill the role I’m here to fill.  

Growing In Virtue

I believe that growing into a woman means having enough self-awareness to know who you want to become. For me, it means growing in courage, discipline, devotion, discernment, clarity, intelligence, generosity, passion, imagination, perseverance, skill, and talent. The Bible also outlines some qualities, “fruits of the spirit,” of people who are filled with the spirit of God: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control. What virtues I focus on in any given season will change, but I’m always keeping a mental scorecard of what kind of person I’m becoming. 

Being a woman means being able to see your flaws and pray or heal your way into wholeness. It means actually wanting to be a better person, not just a person with more money, a prestigious career or the perfect children. It means that I have fundamentally changed to become a woman on the inside, not a girl mascarading as a woman. It means that I have taken the time to integrate my life lessons. It means that the foundation of who I am is built on my goodness, not on my brokenness. 

A Relationship With God 

As my list about what it means to be a woman gew, I still felt like something was missing. Being a woman is not just changing your life on the outside. It’s not just being new work outfits, redecorating my room or eating organic, even if all of these things are motivated by something internal.

What is it that spurs that the internal change? 

For me, it’s my spiritual journey, my relationship with the Divine, my understanding of God and the cosmos. It’s my evolution into the woman I believe that God has created me to me.

God has to be part of growing into womanhood. 

Would I be this intentional about becoming a “woman” if I didn’t believe in God? Probably not. 

There was a time when I looked to people like Marie Forleo, Gabby Bernstein and Tara Stiles as my image of a Woman. They had money, a thriving business, book deals, big social media followings.  Now I look to Jesus and the long line of saints, mystics, reformers, artists and visionaries whose motivation for existence was their love for God. 

While I can’t speak for other women, I can say that the presence of God has been a tangible force in my evolution. If I tried to do this ‘becoming a woman’ thing without God, I’d have to pick an image of someone who is living or lived as my ideal woman and those people who ultimately fail me because they are human. 

Instead, I look into a spiritual reality and I speak to God and I listen to what God has to say about who I’m supposed to be. It’s not an audible voice. It’s more like intuitive hunches that I receive back, sometimes in moments with my journal, when I’m doing random chores about the house, walking on trails, and sometimes it comes to me when I’m writing pieces like this. 

No matter how it comes, the fact is that it keeps coming. The woman in me keeps finding her way out of me and into me. 

Infinite Love,
Anita