As a girl growing up and now, as a woman, I was never told my body was incredibly powerful.
Being a girl and then a woman in sports seemed pretty grim: I'll always be slower and less strong than the holy grail: the male body.
Not interesting, not featured in media, because “female sports is just not interesting.”
But I realised, during my last pregnancy: wow, I created a human.
We, women, create the whole of humanity.
We are god!
We have this incredibly powerful, fine-tuned machine. For 40 years, we can create a human completely from scratch.
As my grandfather likes to say, "Women are magicians. You give them a drop, and they create a baby."
We haven't been told this empowering story.
Instead, we've been mocked: "Women are moody and bitchy, complicated". We get called hysteric.
We’ve been ignored by the research world: 80% of the medical research is still, today, done on males.
Women die because we don't know how to recognise a female heart attack.
We have long-lasting chronic pains, such as PMS, endometriosis, and PCOS, that could be detected early, tackled, researched, and improved.
Pain is not normal.
We have huge hormonal fluctuations that are not explained to us and impact how we feel, metabolise nutrients, and react to sports.
Imagine if a man had his testicles removed. He'd have a huge drop in testosterone. He'd like to know what will happen to him. Right?
A third of women in the US above 60 have a partial or full removal of their ovaries (hysterectomy), with nothing explained to them.
Mental health professionals are surprised women experience mental health struggles. We're prescribed pills to solve it Instead of looking at the core.
Is it hard to be a woman?
I see it as like doing a 100-km ultra-marathon. I could complain the whole way, say it's cold, hard, and perilous. I could have a really bad time.
Or I can feel incredibly grateful to myself. I can look at the stunning view of the early dawn few people see from the top of the mountain at 5 a.m. I’m exhausted but so alive.
Being a woman is hard. There's no question about that.
Having hormonal fluctuations, giving birth, and transitioning to menopause is hard.
But it's also incredible.
We can be so in tune with such an array of emotions. With ourselves and with others.
We get to feel a tiny human in our bellies.
We get to have big life stages and experience a rainbow of the wheel of emotions.
Let’s Reframe
So, for this month, we’re taking it with a twist at Wild.AI.
The way we speak in the app, in our communications is always to make you stronger. More empowered.
More confident.
It doesn't mean ignoring the negative sides.
But understanding it, embracing it, and getting stronger on the other side.
Reframe how we talk to ourselves.
Reframe how we see our incredible bodies, which have fats to sustain us in ultra-endurance or keep us going through pregnancies.
Our female bodies which, on average, live longer than men. Isn’t that powerful?
Our scars of sports, of C-sections.
Our broken fingernails, our urinary leaks.
Our emotions are strong. Because we are not robots.
But also, knowing we are not alone.
Let’s empower ourselves, like with air masks on aeroplanes. We must become the type of women who look after themselves and, in turn, empower others.
So that our little boys, our little girls, see us appreciating our body. Hear us compliment ourselves. So that they do the same.
So our friends can go through the same path.
An empowered woman, confident, entering a room: it's incredibly sexy.
For this month, let's think of the origins of shame on women. Why? Why is it shameful to have a period? To be in perimenopause?
How do we perpetuate this?
How can we first change it, slowly, day after day, for ourselves?
How can we become advocates for other women?
So we can be empowered.
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