Women's Worth Was Never Conditional on Suffering

Every year on International Women's Day, the same stories fill my feed. Women who survived. Women who overcame. Women who rose from abuse, discrimination, and pain.

I am one of those women. I was born into a culture where my gender was considered a liability before I drew my first breath. I have known what it feels like to have your value questioned in your home, in your body, in your own sense of self. I moved to a new country with little but conviction. I built a career, raised a child alone, and kept going on days when that alone felt like enough.

So I say this from inside the story, not outside it.

We need to stop making suffering the price of admission.

Suffering is not the price of admission

When we celebrate women primarily through their pain, we send a quiet message: that hardship is what earns a woman her worth. That you have to endure something first before your success counts.

Think about the girl who has not been broken yet. What does she learn from that? That her life needs a wound to have a story?

Here is what I know to be true. God's grace is not received through suffering. It is not earned by enduring the right amount of pain. It is given freely, before you do anything to deserve it. Your worth was written before your story began.

Women do not rise because of abuse. They rise despite it. The pain was the obstacle. Not the origin.

Pain was just an obstacle

Putting on armour looks wonderful in movies, songs, and stories. In the real world, women are not warriors waiting for a battle to prove themselves. They are mothers, professionals, creators, and leaders, becoming more of who they are every single day. Not because of what they endured. Because of who God made them to be.

This International Women's Day, celebrate that. Celebrate who she is right now. Celebrate who she is becoming.

Celebrate who she is right now.

Her worth was never conditional on what she survived. Grace does not work that way. And neither should we.

She was enough before the hardship. She would have been enough without it.

That is the story every woman, and every girl watching her, deserves to inherit.