Throughout my life, I’ve felt conflicted with my identity as a woman. Not in terms of my gender identity, but all of the additional stuff that comes with presenting as a woman in the world. I’ve always struggled with the rules and expectations that are so intrinsically linked to womanhood, making it a complex and burdensome identity to navigate.

I had a different up bringing to most people, and maybe that’s partly why I’ve battled so much with how my own identity relates to society’s ideal of what it means to be a woman. In terms of my childhood being different, my mum worked full time and was the primary bread winner, and my dad was responsible for the day-to-day running of the house and the childcare. To this day (I’m now 33), I’ve only met one other person who was brought up in a similar situation, which I find strange, as in my eyes it wasn’t as if they were doing anything particularly radical. But what surprises me more, is that even by today’s standards, this set-up is certainly not common.

I guess what I’m trying to say, is that from the beginning, my experience of being a woman, was very different from the archetypal roles that were presented to me by society. And I think that this is why I’ve always felt challenged and conflicted around how I’m expected to present myself to the world, as from an early age it didn’t make sense to me.    

On a daily basis, I see people actively challenging society’s gender archetypes. But what I’ve found, is that even when I consciously feel like I’m trying to challenge these ideals, I somehow still end up feeling burdened by them, and I sometimes even adopt certain stereotypical behaviours.

For example, when I got married, I really struggled with the identity of being a bride. I’d never really thought about marriage throughout my life, but when I met my current partner, I could imagine taking that step with him, and the idea of saying how important we are to each other in front of our loved ones made me feel happy. We got engaged when I was 29 and were married the following year. I’d been involved in friend’s weddings before, but I really couldn’t have prepared myself for all of the feelings and the baggage that came with being a bride myself. I was going through a tough time at that point anyway (leaving my job and having a general crisis about who I was), but the additional pressure I felt around being a bride really pushed me over the edge.

The weirdest part of it was that it was rarely explicit pressure I felt from people or situations, but rather a continuous undercurrent of comments, images of perfection, and my own engrained socialised ideas about how I should be. To put it bluntly, I felt that I had to look and behave in a certain way in order to be a bride. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this to you at the time as it was all too messy in my head, but looking back, I can safely say that this is what I felt. So, I started losing weight, brides need to be skinny right? For years I’ve watched what I eat (as so many of us who identify as women do without even thinking – a topic for another blog), but it became more obsessive, and the guilt was more intense if I felt I’d eaten more than was acceptable. On top of this, I was exercising quite a lot, and also drinking too much. Looking back, it was like I was trying to slowly disappear as I didn’t know who I was or what I should be anymore, and I was too stressed and detached from myself to even begin to dig deep and start to find the answers to those questions.     

On the day of our wedding, I’d barely slept properly for weeks, I was so anxious because of everything that had been going on (leaving my career, not knowing which direction to go in next, losing sight of what was important to me, and the added pressure I’d put on myself of having to be the perfect bride), that I just wanted to stop thinking. I’d been trying to do what I thought was right, but it wasn’t making me happy, and everything had simply become distorted in my head. So, I did what I always used to do back then when things got too much, I got wasted.   

I had complete memory loss from the early evening, and by about midnight, I was so drunk that I had to be carried out of my own wedding. Unsurprisingly, this only left me in a worse state than before. I woke up the morning after our wedding with Ollie slowly explaining to me what had happened, and I burst into tears. I was so ashamed and embarrassed that I’d gotten myself into such a state. I felt like I was going to be judged, and I judged myself, because drinking to the point of obliteration and passing out wasn’t how a bride was expected to behave on her wedding day. I guess if I were a man, my behaviour would have probably been congratulated, seen as one last blow out before entering the world of domestic bliss, but I wasn’t a man.   

For the first week of our honeymoon I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d behaved, and the tears kept coming. Not the greatest start to married life. I felt so bad for Ollie, and my parents, and I thought I’d ruined what everyone describes as their perfect day. I loved saying my vows to Ollie in front of our closest people, but our wedding day was far from the best day of my life which you so commonly hear. And this made me feel like even more of a failure. The scripted line for women is that their wedding day is perfect, amazing, and better than any other day they could imagine. I’ve never agreed with this, but not only was our wedding day not the best day, it was my fault that it hadn’t played out as weddings should.

It’s only recently that I’ve been able to let go of the guilt that I was still carrying around my behaviour on our wedding day. Part of the reason for this was that I fully explained to the people I felt I wanted to exactly what I was going through at that time and getting things out into the open really helped. But also, I shouldn’t have felt so bad about it. And one of the reasons that I did was because my behaviour that day went against everything we’re taught in terms of what it means to be a bride, or in other words, to be an acceptable woman. And because my behaviour wasn’t acceptable, I would’ve been judged, in however big or small a way, and also by people that are my friends. And them judging me is kind of not their fault because they’re simply viewing me through the lens of what is right and wrong by general standards. But that judgement made me feel small and unworthy, and it’s a judgement that I feel is never placed as harshly onto men.  

So what next? Identifying as a woman is complicated, and I think we all need to challenge the perfect ideals of womanhood that we see around us, in whatever way we can. I now try to question my own judgements of others, as they are ultimately a reflection of how I am also judging myself. I try to listen to people at every opportunity in order to help me empathise. And finally, I try to act in solidarity with other woman, supporting them in ways I can, instead of allowing myself to fall into the trap of critiquing and shaming them for their choices and behaviour, something society loves to do.

And finally, it’s important to remember that none of us are alone. We’re all trying our best to navigate our own identities and it’s not easy at times. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and hope that by sharing some of my own experiences, this will resonate and encourage you to own who you are.