As my birthday looms heavily, I find myself anxious in a way I have never been before, mainly because I’m becoming affected by societal pressures to define myself in two main ways: Wife. Mother.
Entering the last year of my mid-thirties, I am neither yet a wife nor a mother, and I now feel like I am running out of time–even though I had not given myself a deadline or ever really desired to define myself by those two roles. While it is easy to say, “Why care what society thinks?! Live your life!” Chimamanda Adichie eloquently offers this perspective: “[R]eality is more difficult, more complex. We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.”
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