Women’s Dreams Do Not Have An Expiry Date
Tick tock.
Tick tock.
I’m sitting at my desk, I look up and see them: the hands of the clock are watching me.
They are moving so fast that they give me shivers.
Women’s dreams should not have an expiry date.
Yet, it is imposed on us. It is.
They should not even be dictated to us.
Yet, they are often imposed on us. They are.
The experience of dreaming, in its dense web of words, figures and sounds, often as mysterious as oracles to decipher, says much about our personality.
No matter how hard we try to think the opposite every day, it is clear before our eyes that this is not the case.
All it takes is a little empathy to realise this.
When I learned who I was, I understood a lot about myself.
It took some time before I accepted myself, before I looked in the mirror and saw who I really was.
My only dream has always been to achieve a job that I can be proud of. I am an extremely hardworking, determined person. I have clear goals, and I am ambitious.
For a long time this made me feel wrong.
A freak of nature, because where I’m from women are not born for it.
It is known.
A part of society knows what our true purpose is and their voices still echo in the heads of women like me. The pressure on a woman to reflect, to embody the perfect ideal is too much. Just as the hands of the clock follow their rhythm, tick tock – tick tock, so should we.
We have to shake it off.
I started thinking about what we stand for one day a few years ago.
I had just started my career. And I was working hard but I knew that what I was doing was all I was capable of. I was chasing my dream.
One day I was told that a colleague of mine was expecting a baby and could no longer work as hard as before; her rhythms and hours had now totally changed.
Thus began the revolution of the office, or rather, of her life, and of ours as a consequence. I took over her role.
What a joy!
I was cheerful, happy, carefree!
What a party!
After all the hard work, finally some recognition.
My emotions were short-lived, however, because I began to think about how I had achieved that position.
Can, such an important decision as having a baby, bring about such a radical change in a woman’s life? Could someone give her some time, a necessary period of time to reorganise herself, and return to achieving her dream?
If one day I gave birth to a child, would I really risk losing my job, even though I had always, with obstinacy, achieved all my goals?
Would I really be forced to choose?
I have asked myself these questions many times and have come to the conclusion that “NO”, this is not how we should imagine our future.
We have the right to work, to love, to be free.
We have the right to choose who we are.
No matter where we come from, it is our dreams, whatever they may be, and not the hands of the clock, that count!