Dauntless fidelity of women: Structured to balance the structure
The world does not run on luck. It runs on women balancing everything and making it look effortless. They were never taught to juggle, but were only handed everything and told not to drop it. Give a task, and she will excel. Give her several, and she will make a system out of it.
“You’re amazing, I do not understand how you do it all,” he compliments while she hears an assessment. She only knows that if she stops, everything else will too. He calls her a superwoman; she calls it her life. Women do not always have it all. They hold it together without applause, instruction manuals or the luxury of failing.
Women can hold a deadline in one hand and a loved one’s crisis in the other. From negotiating salaries to remembering birthdays, chores, and preferences, they know when anything is off-key and will step in before the milk boils over or the project derails. Across boardrooms, classrooms, kitchens, and laboratories, women expand to fit in. They grow into roles that did not exist before. Leadership looks softer in their hands, but no less decisive. Strength looks warmer, but no less formidable.
And yet, much of this labour stays unseen – being the reminder clock, the planner, the emotional calibrator; all of it so seamlessly done that it is mistaken for nature rather than effort. Thus, women’s excellence becomes an expectation. Examples are all around us. Pick a random classroom from the university and ask who is leading the group presentation. A girl’s hand will rise. While working on her own assignment, she ensures everyone finishes theirs as well. In Sultana Sarwatara’s (Sophomore, SLS) words, “Group task? I tend to handle most of it, also learning a thing or two along the way”.
Afsana Parvez, one of the washroom attendants of the university, rises before dawn, gets her household running, comes to the campus and keeps it running, before going back home to an unappreciative partner’s complaint, asking why his food is not piping hot. And her story is just a spitting example of the average woman’s experience in our country.
Women’s exhaustion is the mark of battles fought in silence, as it is the evidence of how much they carry and persist. Not because they are trying to be everything, but because they have discovered that they need to be many things at once. From being a leader and nurturer to an architect and artist, a strategist and a sanctuary, the list only seems endless.
The world may look effortless; look closely, there is likely a woman everywhere, quietly conducting.
