We Limited Them

War is called masculine.

The greatest warrior in our tradition is Goddess Durga. A woman.

Dance is called feminine.

The greatest dancer in the universe is Lord Shiva. A man.

In the Mahabharata, who cried the most? Arjuna the celebrated hero, the one with the bow. And who carried the sharpest, most enduring rage in that entire epic? Draupadi the woman everyone expected to endure quietly.

Four examples. Three thousand years old. Sitting in plain sight.

Our own stories have been contradicting us the entire time. We chose not to listen because listening would have required us to dismantle something that, however cramped, felt like home.

Here is what we actually did.

We took the full range of human experience courage, grief, fury, tenderness, strength, softness and split it down the middle. This half is masculine. This half is feminine. Stay on your side.

We called this culture. We called it nature.

What it actually was: a limitation dressed as a definition.

And definitions, once given to children young enough to believe them, don't feel like cages. They feel like identity. That is what makes them so difficult to undo not that they are enforced from outside, but that they are eventually carried from within.

The man who never cried. Trained into it so early that by adulthood the training felt like personality. The cage had become the self.

The woman who swallowed her anger for thirty years. Not because she had nothing to be angry about. Because anger was not on her permitted list.

Both diminished. Both living at a fraction of what they actually were.

This is not ancient history.

This is last Sunday. Every family. Every city. Every dinner table where someone swallowed something that deserved to be said.

Sometimes the ideas worth keeping need to stay visible on a wall, on a page, on a mug you reach for every morning.

The stories always knew this.

Durga did not ask permission to be formidable. Shiva did not apologise for being graceful. Arjuna's tears did not disqualify his courage. Draupadi's rage did not make her less.

It made her real.

The mythology was never the problem. The reading was.

We inherited stories full of complete, contradictory, fully human figures & used them to build boxes smaller than the stories, smaller than the people inside them, smaller than any of us deserved.

Strength is a choice. Available to anyone willing to claim it, regardless of what they were told at seven years old about what kind of person they were allowed to become.

We were not given these limits by the universe.

We gave them to each other.

We did not define masculine and feminine.

We only limited them.