Some Women Do Not Get to Choose

On this earth, right now, there is a woman who will never get to live her life because it was stolen by the violence of the world. Because her life was taken from her before she ever had the chance to choose it. There will be no long future for this woman to look up to. No thrilling moments of trying to figure out her life or who she wants to become.

This woman’s story stopped before it properly began. She will never stand in front of a mirror on a Friday evening holding two dresses, debating which one to wear to dinner with friends. She will never take spontaneous trips. Never sit around a table with women she loves, laughing too loudly, arguing about men, work, money, life.

She will never fall in love the way free women do. She will never look a man in the eye and decide for herself whether he is worthy of her body, her affection, her future.

She will never negotiate a salary. Never switch careers at thirty five. She will never wake up one morning and decide she wants something entirely different from the life she built. She will never step outside at sunset, stretch her arms toward the sky, breathe deeply, and say to herself with quiet satisfaction, Yes!  This is the life I chose.

Because years ago, she was one of the Chibok girls taken by Biko haram in 2014 and unlike the ones who got lucky, she never returned to her family and the life she could’ve had.

She was a school girl. Sitting in school. Studying. And in a single day, her entire life collapsed. The future she might have had vanished into the dark with the men who took her. The woman she might have become will never exist.

Marriage and motherhood were forced upon her by men she would never willingly touch. Her body became a territory conquered by violence. Her world narrowed overnight. Her days now belong to survival. She wakes up and begins another morning inside a life she did not choose and cares for children that she was forced to bear and gathers whatever fragments of meaning she can from a life that was imposed upon her like a sentence.

She will probably never travel. Never build a career. Never live alone in a city she chose. Never reinvent herself halfway through life the way free people do. All the possibilities that make a human life expansive and exhilarating are gone.

Every year on International Women’s day, the world celebrates women. We post inspiring quotes and congratulate ourselves on progress we have made as women fighting for a place in a man’s world.  But somewhere among us are women whose lives were interrupted before they even had the chance to begin. Girls whose futures were swallowed whole before they had the chance to imagine them.

Somewhere among them is a woman who should have been a doctor.

Or a teacher.

Or an engineer.

Or an artist.

Or a writer.

Or simply a woman living an ordinary life on her own terms. Instead, she’s a ghost inside a life forced upon her.

But here you are. You can walk out your door whenever you want. You can choose where you live. Choose what work you pursue. Choose whether you marry, and who you marry. Choose who touches your body and who never will.

You possess the most radical power a human being can have; the ability to decide the course of your own life. And yet so many women shrink that life voluntarily. They settle for relationships that suffocate them and dreams that are smaller than the ones they once carried. They surrender their freedom piece by piece until they become prisoners in their own lives.

There’s a woman who would give anything for the choices you treat casually. To stand where you stand. If you want to honor her, do it by refusing to waste the freedom they were denied. Build something magnificent with the years that belong to you.

Live your life with urgency.