I Don’t Want To Be Special

Today is “International Women’s Day” as mostly everyone knows thanks to media, social media and the incessant messages we have been receiving on phone with promotional discounts from pizza shop to Panwala for “Women’s Day”.

So before going further, dear women the customary “Happy Women’s Day” to you all.

Now tell me, do you remember when is “International Men’s Day”? I bet you can’t. There’s always much more fanfare with “our day” because we women are always treated specially compared men.

We are treated specially is obvious from the facts that we get less pay for the same job, we have to wear more cloths than men in same hot weather, we maybe a scientist but we are being mansplained by a graduate on basic science, even if we are of the same age as the male lead in a film we play his mother and we have the same (if not more) hectic day as men but we are assumed to be “just sitting at home” or “neglecting children, husband and in-laws by working”.

The pretty girl with perfect make up tells us we can buy the expensive lipstick because “we are worth it”. But we are more special than that. Forget that lipstick we have to justify we are worthy of sitting for fifteen minutes without doing anything.

We are so special that we keep on doing unpaid jobs without getting any appreciation in real life. To get some kind of appreciation for our cooking, gardening, crafting we need to post the pictures online which results in few more jokes in our name. We are special so being butt of few more jokes can’t hurt us. Only thing hurts us is we can’t post pictures of our washing, dusting and staying awake for children online.

Media have been really nice to us too. Again according to media we are special too. We are beautiful, we are sacrificing super human, we are saccharine sweet loving, super caring and the great silent sufferer like supposed to be another woman ‘Mother Earth’. We are the mother, wife, sister, wife and so on.

It is so nice to have so many virtues. Media just assume since we are special we will live up to all these idealistic expectations.

Has anyone thought if we really want to be special and put on a pedestal or not?

The truth is every moment we struggle to live up to the constant expectations from us. We don’t want to make the sacrifices but we are left with no other choice. We don’t want to suffer silently but lack of physical and economic advantages force us into it. We don’t want to be a “nag” but we care too much to not to. We don’t want to stay in our “unsafe” home but the world is more “unsafe”.

The way our mothers, mothers-in-law and grand mothers lived is a burden on us. We can’t achieve that greatness because we don’t want to achieve that greatness we just want to live with our heads held high and some real life appreciation for the unpaid jobs. We just want to be ‘us’, not just defined by some relation.

We want to be mean, we want to be selfish, we want to be lazy, we want to be adulteress and many other things without being judged much more harshly because we are women.

No, I don’t want to be special. I just want to be an average human being who is treated at par with all other human beings; neither better in any manner nor worse in any manner.