What It Means To Be a Woman
Born with Pain Built In, Christina Mokwa + Katherine Alt (2025)
Digital collage
What It Means to Be a Woman
(in 500 Words or Less)
To be a woman is to live as monolith, as duality, as triad // to be a woman is to take a zoftig shape to hide your thousand eyes.
To be a woman is to silently sit at the center of the cosmogony, golden thread of your stomach extending to all life.
To be a woman is to be a door — a threshold — crossed and leaned on for lifetimes.
To be a woman is to be thrashed and beaten — to know the feeling of the cold floor on your delicate, amethyst cheek — and to convince yourself that you will never, never allow yourself to be put there again.
To be a woman is to be a mourning dove, an everyday hopeful blackbird — singing despite the madness.
To be a woman is to live with one eye over your shoulder — always silently waiting to be dragged away // to be a woman is to be burdened with knowing the histories — words like hysteria, sanatorium, and my personal favorite you need to calm down.
To be a woman is to speak of the unspoken gifts to your mother, only to watch her blanch — and to know, unequivocally, how utterly alone you are.
To be a woman is to spend a lifetime making peace — not spent fixing who you are, but simply no longer ignoring what you’ve always known is inside you.
To be a woman is an individual prescription.
To be a woman is to become bedfellows with pain, rage, discomfort — a trio of unfulfilling lovers who never seem to know when to leave.
To be a woman is to twirl magic around your fingers like hair — errant and unthinking, utterly natural.
Being a woman is to keep your head and hips on a swivel — to count teeth and bodies — to say please and thank you, while the waiter asks how you’d like your tea.
To be a woman is to continually, obstinately carve a Middle Way // to be a woman is to be light on your feet while in chains — nights filled with plans to make your great escape — so as not to wake God.
To be a woman is to straddle worlds in the grocery isle, the car pickup line.
To be a woman is to hold the knife and be slaughtered.
To be a woman is blissful agony — daily death, and birth, and prayer.
Being a woman is a warm, deep laugh — it is wonder, and stone fruit, and books away from prying eyes.
To be a woman is ultimate aliveness.
To be a woman is to love to the point of bursting.
*Written work by Christina Mokwa – © Christina Mokwa/Mokwa LLC/Mokwa Creative Company
