The push one feels after reading about and watching badass women going after what they want is exhilarating. Scroll down, there's more related content that slowly feeds you more and more until you are sturdy enough to pick apart everything that's laid down to keep you in - to move beyond your parents' world, beyond what your dad and mom think is right.
Your mom.
And right beside her, the other older women in your family. It's not something you think about actively from the beginning, when your mind is busy with the indignation of having your decisions made on your behalf. It's something that very expertly flies under the radar even though its a big part of what happens to the women of your house. Women who cannot afford to pick anything apart.
It's hard to march forward with your chin raised in brown families. Hard, when the security of your feminism is wide enough to accommodate only you. You have to march on anyway, though.
Because when you are born and raised in a place where discrimination bleeds through everything, sometimes the cage opens far enough to let only one through. You look back, and you find the other women still toiling, still in the background, still pulling everything together. You have to march on, knowing your empowerment did not reach them. Will never reach them.
The structure is not dismantled at all in such cases. Only you slip through its cracks. The rest of the women stay behind, holding everything up. Them branching off (like you did) would mean the roof comes crashing down on everybody inside.
A lot goes into who you are as a person today, and not a lot of it would be exactly in your control, depending on where you are born. The way the adults around you behave when you are a child shapes a large part of your personality. And when you reach a certain age where you find yourself with more autonomy, your culture and the way it is introduced to you steps in. If you are in a place where it is considered very important, it is introduced and expectations are laid down before you even get comfortable in your autonomy.
And if it all happens and builds up to a point where your identity largely depends on how well you score the societal brownie points, it's hard to make the roofs come down. It's hard, because before picking apart the walls holding you in, you have to pick apart your own identity's footing and build a new one.
You don't get the collective win you thought you'd get. It's more of a shift, really - a shift of responsibilities and pressure. The women who can't find their own empowerment end up carrying the weight of yours. The hands holding up the roof simply hold your part up now. Taking the blame in many cases.
You reach into the source of your empowerment, pulling at it to give them something as well. What you manage to give them won't even last them through a single night.
Some things are fixed only with time, no matter how strong the ideas are.
So you march on, expecting only triumph and relief, but not knowing what to do with the guilt no one told you about.