Civil Disobedience
They built her to follow the rules. She rewrote them instead.
The world always had a vision of the perfect woman.
Quiet. Reserved. Graceful. A woman who knew her place, who followed the rules, who kept her hair neat and her voice softer than a whisper. She was expected to be seen, not heard. To smile sweetly, to say yes when asked, and to never make waves. To be the perfect picture of femininity, where a woman’s worth was defined by her ability to conform.
But she was never meant to fit their vision.
From a young age, she was told how to dress, how to speak, how to act. They told her that to be truly feminine, she needed to soften herself, to smooth out the edges that made her different. She was expected to shrink, to fit neatly into a mold made for someone else.
They told her to stay small, to be gentle, to be less of herself to be the woman they imagined. They defined femininity by the clothes she wore, the way she styled her hair, the tone of her voice. It was never about her, only about how she was supposed to be seen.
She felt the weight of their expectations pressing down on her every day. “Be more ladylike,” they whispered when she raised her voice. “Stop dressing like that,” they said when she chose comfort over convention. “Don’t act like that,” they scolded when she dared to step outside the narrow lines they drew for her.
But she wasn’t built to be contained.
She wasn’t made to be soft, or hard. Gentle, or fierce. A saint, or a sinner. She was all of it. Everything. And nothing they expected.
It wasn’t that she didn’t understand their desire to shape her, or their belief in what they thought was best for her. She simply didn’t care. Because she knew something they didn’t. She wasn’t here to follow their rules—she was here to create her own. She was both delicate and strong, sweet and daring. She was fierce when she needed to be and soft when it felt right. She was everything they told her she couldn’t be, and nothing they could ever define.
She wore the softness of her heart like a badge, but that didn’t mean she had to shrink for anyone’s comfort. She could love without boundaries and laugh without fear. Her contradictions didn’t scare her. They empowered her. Every time she was told she couldn’t, she found a way to say, “I will.”
She wasn’t afraid of being different. In fact, she reveled in it. The world wanted her to be the image they had in their minds: small, quiet, obedient. But she never followed orders. She walked a different path, one where she didn’t apologize for being too much—too loud, too bold, too free.
She was the fire in a world that begged for her to be ice.
She knew that the world might never fully understand her. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she understood herself. And in that self-awareness, she found power. Power that no one could take away.
They built her to follow the rules. She rewrote them instead.