By fourteen, I already sensed my path would unfold differently.
I didn’t play with dolls or dream of a white dress. What I craved was freedom.
I grew up in Brooklyn, where the city moved fast—and so did the lessons.
Girls were not protected.
Men held the power.
Harassment was normalized.
You learned early what it meant to be prey.
My childhood taught me to be vigilant—to read nuance, pick up on subtleties, and make sense of unspoken rules.
I noticed early on how women moved through the world—smiling, serving, sacrificing. Always proper. Always composed. It was most obvious at church, which seemed more concerned with appearances than with connection, as if they were constantly calculating how much space they were allowed to occupy—physically, emotionally, energetically.
Men moved through life with far fewer restrictions.
By my mid-teens, I understood how quickly safety could be stolen—and how important it was to pay attention, trust my instincts, and hold my ground. I briefly entertained modeling as a form of creative expression, but learned how unsafe that landscape could be. During a school internship, two men— attorneys — offered to photograph me—then tried to get me to take off my top. I left and never went back.
I was fourteen— so young, thankfully defiant. I remember the instinct to leave, protect myself — because no one was coming to save me.
By seventeen, I was already changing out of my skirt suit to hide in an oversized hoodie after work—dodging attention on the subway home. I wasn’t naive. I made sure I wasn’t a victim. I learned to protect myself.
And every girl I knew had her version of this story.
Predatory men weren’t the exception.
They were the environment.
I was aware of injustice: the entitlement of men, the silence of women, the burden of being sexualized. It didn’t just wound me— it sharpened me. That refusal to play along shaped my independence and became part of my identity.
The power of beauty and youth was a double-edged sword: a currency that often came at a price. I often navigated a landscape of overt or covert sexualization. Power and vulnerability danced a constant, uneasy tango. That hyper-awareness followed me into adulthood—into most jobs I had.
And the pressure to be thin—not healthy, just thin. Acceptable. Contained. Desirable on someone else’s terms. It was everywhere: fat-free everything, grains over real food, and wasn’t red meat supposed to be bad for you? Hunger as discipline. Be less. Shrink yourself to be acceptable.
I never saw a man turn down a steak.
At times, I think I unconsciously gained weight—both as a form of rebellion and as a kind of protection.
I was well aware of the unwritten rules: how a woman should look, behave, sacrifice, and stay silent—the unspoken codes about what to say, what to hide, and which feelings were unacceptable to show.
I preferred black jeans, boots, and Led Zeppelin tees over playing dress-up, and wore makeup my way. I found freedom in the melting pot of NYC—a place full of contradictions, but also crevices where I could belong.
I was always observing. Drawing. Writing. Documenting the tension between who I was and who the world expected me to be.
I grew up caught between cultural expectations and the times: be independent, but not too bold; be intelligent, but not intimidating; be kind, but not too outspoken.
The larger expectation was clear: marriage, motherhood, and selflessness were the measure of a woman’s worth. My mother folded herself into that blueprint—church on Sundays, dinner on the table, performing the role even as something in her remained unresolved.
There were secrets—burdens too heavy to name, choices she never fully had.
The undercurrents were strong, even when words were absent. Navigating complex emotions without tools, language or validation became second nature to me.
There wasn’t one dramatic moment of rebellion—just a slow accumulation of knowing. A quiet refusal to disappear into the life expected of me.
The patterns were always there. We just weren’t supposed to name them.
Girls weren’t protected.
Women weren’t believed.
We were simply expected to survive.
Back then, you didn’t report it.
You didn’t tell anyone.
You just left.
Adjusted.
Grew a thicker shell.
Pretended it didn’t mark you.
But it did.
And it shaped me.
It shaped why independence mattered.
Motherhood never called to me in a way that felt true.
Some part of me knew I needed to understand myself before passing anything on.
Being childfree wasn’t a rejection —
it was an act of self-honesty, and maybe even protection.
My mother lived in a world of secrecy, shame, and survival—a world that shaped her sense of self, and silently shaped mine.
It’s only now, looking back, that I fully understand the weight she carried. The silence. The loss. The forced choices.
The cost of a life she didn’t fully choose—severed parts of her—and some of those fragments lived on in me. In some ways, I became the part of herself she had long buried, and couldn’t bear to see in me.
Choosing not to have children was, in many respects, an act of honesty — a refusal to pass down patterns I hadn’t yet unlearned.
I broke the cycle.
I took the long way home.
I didn’t reject motherhood.
I rejected the cage.
“The world tells us how to be women. Our mothers show us what it costs.”
Read:
→ A Life Outside the Blueprint
→ The Space Between Us
→ The Missing Link
→ Life Outside the Frame
→ Emotional Inheritance
