I Write This To Let You Know That I Admire You!

Dear Woman,

We are completely unknown to each other, but that does not mean that we are unaware of each other. I may not recognize you by face, but I can identify you by your pain and it works the same for you. Knowingly or unknowingly, deliberately or by sheer coincidence, whichever it is, I neither know nor care about.

What I do know is that we are travellers to the same destination and though our paths may look different, they are the one and same. This is why I am writing to you to let you know that no matter how perilous the journey may become, you are never truly alone. 

I know that the last year has been a rough year for almost everyone. I know the last year has been especially rough on you. I do not know the details of what exactly happened. I do not know what is it that made you curse the year that went by. 

Maybe you lost someone extremely near and dear to you. Maybe it was a relationship that went sour. Maybe it was a love story that did not end the way you intended for it to end. Maybe it was you losing respect for someone for something they did, either to you or to someone else.

Maybe it was your parents, who doubled down on you to get married to someone you did not like. Maybe you had to suffer because of your gender. Maybe you were targeted for your success by jealous male colleagues.

Maybe you were denied a rightful promotion because you refused to entertain your boss. Maybe you had to go through the worst kind of abuse that women can face. 

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Maybe you were so preoccupied with the life struggles that you could not care about how you looked. Maybe your detractors taunted you for your messy hair. Maybe they poked fun at your weight issues. 

I do not know what difficulties you had to face in the last year. I do not know how you coped with that stress. 

I may not know anything about what made your last year a disaster but there is something I do know.

And that is the fact that you have survived possibly the worst phase of your life. I know that despite all the odds stacked against you, you did not give up. You tried to scale that mountain and even if you might have failed, you failed trying. And even that failure is not permanent.

I know that while I am writing this letter you are already standing up on your feet and dusting your clothes to prepare for the next attempt at scaling the peak. 

My dear, I want you to know that however, the last year may have been, I am proud of what you have done or tried to get done. I am proud of your consistent efforts; your fighting attitude and your desire to learn from your mistakes. I am proud of the strength that allowed you to face such tumultuous scenarios, and yet survive to tell the tale. 

Always remember that we live in a deeply misogynistic society. They hate our success; they cherish our struggles, and they celebrate our failures.

Feminism is a threat to their rule, you are a threat to their rule. They will deploy all the tactics available in the book to keep women suppressed. They want to keep women preoccupied with how they look so that they can outrun us.

Yes, your hair may be messy, your attire may be dishevelled but these things do not define you. What defines you is what you do and when you start doing it, it scares this patriarchal society. 

My dear as a new Gregorian year has dawned upon us, I want you to look back upon the year that went by, not to feel bad or sad about the turn of events but to draw strength from the fact that you survived that. I want you to look back and pat yourself and buckle up for what lies ahead.

I want you to stay focussed because trust me, more obstacles will be thrown in your life to slow you down or to ultimately derail you, but I know they will fail because 

“Every obstacle that you faced, every wound that gave you pain,

Has faded into the past, and you are all that remains,

What lies ahead, you may not know, but now you are strong,

You are a veteran of this war, The world will sing your songs.”

 Love and Respect,

Your admirer.

Image Source: VikramRaghuvanshi from Getty Images via Canva Pro

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