“I Wish I Was a Boy”

Do you wish to be a boy? Or You wish freedom?

I remember saying it a lot when I was younger.

“I wish I was a boy.”

At the time, I thought I was joking.

But looking back, I don’t think it was really a joke.

Not completely.

And the strange part is that I never actually felt like a boy.

I didn’t want to be one.

I wanted the freedom they had.

Because where I grew up, being a boy meant freedom in ways girls didn’t have.

Boys could go outside whenever they wanted.

Ride bikes freely.

Stay out late.

Travel.

Move through the world without constantly being watched, questioned, or limited.

Meanwhile, girls were surrounded by rules.

Rules about behavior.

Rules about safety.

Rules about what “good girls” do.

And when you grow up around that long enough, you slowly start associating womanhood with limitation.

I was always someone who craved freedom deeply.

I wanted movement. Adventure. Choice. Independence.

But every time I looked around, it felt like boys were allowed to experience life more fully.

And girls were expected to stay smaller.

Quieter.

More controlled.

At that age, I didn’t know how to challenge those beliefs.

So instead, I wished to become the gender that seemed free.

A boy.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I wasn’t rejecting being female.

I was rejecting what I had learned being female was supposed to mean.

There’s a difference.

A huge one.

Because a lot of girls don’t actually hate being girls.

They hate the restrictions attached to girlhood.

They hate the expectations.

The limitations.

The feeling that someone else always has authority over their life.

In some places, girls still grow up feeling like their freedom belongs to other people.

Parents decide.

Brothers decide.

Husbands decide.

Society decides.

And eventually, some girls stop imagining freedom for themselves at all.

They just start imagining being someone else.

Someone who’s allowed to have it.

Looking back now, I can see how those thoughts slowly become beliefs.

Deep ones.

The kind that shape how you live without you even noticing.

I thought being a woman meant:

staying smaller serving others listening more than speaking sacrificing freedom accepting limitations

And because I believed that, I thought freedom could only exist outside of womanhood.

But the real shift for me happened when I started questioning what I had been taught.

I started realizing that many of those “rules” were never natural truths.

They were conditioning.

Learned expectations.

Invisible beliefs passed from one person to another until they started feeling normal.

I stopped asking:

“Why can’t women be free?”

And started asking:

“Who taught us freedom was never ours to begin with?”

That changed everything for me.

Because the solution for me was never becoming someone else.

It was unlearning the version of womanhood I inherited.

And rebuilding it on my own terms.

Maybe freedom was never something women lacked.

Maybe many of us were just taught we weren’t supposed to reach for it.

Have you ever realized you didn’t hate being a girl… you hated what the world taught being a girl was supposed to mean?