Most of my life, I’ve been a highly independent person and proudly so. I have grown myself up, travelled alone, personal decisions. I am even praised for being so independent. I can’t say I did not enjoy the glory. I have rejected my support system fiercely and craved the glory of independence.
Growing up and be independent! That’s all that has been a goal. I had made personal independence as my virtue. Independence from parents, from education, and when you have your heartbroken, independence from being in love. I hated the word “compromise” and the only way to achieve. Doing something all by yourself takes no compromising. I don’t have to think about someone else’s feelings, I don’t have to worry about their needs, I don’t have to take care of anyone but me. Now, this sounds more and more like selfish than independence.
I realise the bigger struggle is to collaborate and come to a solution where everyone has their needs met, to give as well as take. Now that felt like growing up, the test of real courage. Are we glorifying independence because we don’t want to take care of other people? Because everywhere I went, someone was telling me I needed to find my freedom. Everywhere I looked, I searched in vain for that independence I once had, finally having to accept I would never be an unemotional, unattached person again.
Maybe we need not be independent. Self-made Is so overrated. Nobody is. We need not be. Even world war was won by the alliance. We need 2 for a clap or make a life. You need light and day to survive, you need bones and muscles. The world is not singular, the world is not independent. Even earth is going round and round the sun with a crazy crush that it can’t collide into and it can’t move away from. Earth is so on its own, so much in its own, but its existence is a collaborative one.
I know now that I can’t go at it alone or maybe even if I can I don’t want to do this alone. I want to live a life with friends and family supporting each other through the good, the rough, and everything in between. And I want a romantic partner to experience life with me. I want to have support emotionally, physically, and financially a coexistence.
My feminazi is in admitting that we need more feminine collaboration than the masculine ideal of success and independence. I want to find that freedom of shared submission and being part of something bigger than self-sufficiency.