My feminism didn’t start as a label I wanted to wear, Like those girls who knew they didn't "like" the system. It started as discomfort, like grit under my skin. It started when I read Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta in a little later at junior school three, and saw how a woman’s entire existence could be bent and bruised around what men wanted, expected, and demanded. That was the first crack I noticed in the system, a system I’d always been taught was “normal.”

Then I read Tomorrow I Become a Woman. Then We Were Girls Once. And each book ripped the thick blindfold a little further off my eyes and I began to realize that the things women endure (because a woman is praised for how much she can endure). They’re part of a pattern.

Now I’m reading bell hooks, Chimamanda, Mikki Kendall, names I used to hear but never truly listened to. Now I listen. Because I’m searching for a language to express the rage and exhaustion that bubbles under my skin when I hear casual misogyny slip off tongues like it’s nothing.

I’m an angry feminist. And I’m unashamed.

My feminism is taking me places I never planned to go. I volunteered at a TEDXBAZE Event and I watched Women speak, It’s pulling me into conversations I once felt too timid to join. It’s showing me that silence is complicity, and that my voice even if it trembles matters. I’m still figuring out what kind of feminist I am. I know I don’t fit into one perfect box. I love beige, lipgloss, and pink things — but I’m also fierce and unwilling to keep quiet when something feels wrong.

I don’t have it all figured out yet. But I know one thing: I am a feminist.

I Encourage everyone to read A Feminist Manifesto by The Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche.

Notes

Effik Faith

My Newfound Passion for Feminism: A Note to Myself

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