I met my younger self for coffee this Saturday.
She insisted it be a Saturday — our favourite day. Not because I was born on one (though I was), but because Saturdays always held the delicious promise of rest. Of not setting an alarm. Of sleeping in, wrapped in the comfort that tomorrow was still yours.
They say 90% of our happiness comes not from the event itself, but from the anticipation of it. Saturday, in that sense, was our happy place. She looked at me cautiously. Not like she was meeting an old friend, but like she was studying a stranger. My hair was longer now, my voice slower, my eyes calmer — everything she had once dreamed of but hadn’t yet grown into.
“Do you know how to do magic now?” she asked, eyes wide. The kind of wide that held more than wonder — it held belief. Like she always knew we weren’t meant to be ordinary. I smiled. “Not the kind with spells or stardust. But I believe in prayer. In softness. In quiet strength.”
She wasn’t impressed. She wanted wands. She wanted light from fingertips and applause from the universe. She wanted to feel special.
“Are we famous at least?” “No,” I said gently. “But we wrote books. Some people sent heartfelt emails. Someone, somewhere, may admire us quietly.”
She frowned. “You’re not me.”
To soften the distance, I asked, “What’s your favourite colour?”
“Pink,” she said instantly.
“That’s mine too.”
Her eyes lit up. “Really?”
And just like that, we became the same person again.
But it hadn’t always been that way. There was a time I hated pink. I hated what it represented — softness, submission, the idea of being a “good girl”. I resented household chores, resisted domesticity, and believed femininity was something to be outgrown if I wanted to be taken seriously. Like many women of my generation, I was taught to be bold, ambitious, self-sufficient — and always slightly on edge.
What no one told us was that surviving like that for years would come at a cost. My body began to whisper warnings. Hormones misfired. Sleep felt like a chore. Stress lived in my chest like an uninvited tenant. I was functioning, but frayed. Succeeding, but suffering. Therapy gave me language, but I already knew the truth: I didn’t have a disorder. I had an energy imbalance.
We had all learned to over-identify with masculine energy — to chase, hustle, conquer — and in doing so, we exiled the feminine: intuition, rest, slowness, receptivity. In that rejection, we lost something vital.
Nature has always mirrored us. Or maybe we mirror it. “The moon glows only when kissed by the sun.”
Men are like the sun — linear, steady, fiery. Women are like the moon — cyclical, intuitive, ever evolving. Like the moon, a woman moves through phases — bleeding, blooming, becoming. She shifts and changes, yet remains whole. Radiant. Powerful. Always herself. When supported, the feminine doesn’t diminish — she glows. The moon lights our darkest nights. The sun sustains our days. One demands respect. The other earns love.
One is not better than the other. They are not equal in form — but they are equal in importance. We live in a world obsessed with speed, performance, and noise. Somewhere in that race, the quiet power of femininity got mislabelled as weakness. But the universe doesn’t run on equality. It runs on balance. Light and dark. Hot and cold. Sun and moon. Masculine and feminine. Justice is not sameness. Justice is reverence.
So I began a quiet experiment. I walked slower. I chewed slower. I spoke with softness. I let beauty in. I stopped trying to prove. I began to receive. I realised I never hated household work — I hated the way it was expected of me. I never hated pink — I hated that no one told me it was powerful. The healing began when I stopped trying to be strong like a man and started letting myself be powerful like a woman.
So when I told her pink was my favourite colour, it wasn’t a lie. It was a full-circle moment. A quiet revolution. A remembering. In a world where feminism once meant becoming everything but a woman, maybe it’s time we ask:
Is feminine energy the new feminism? Because maybe the magic I was looking for wasn’t in spells or stardom. Maybe it was in the softness I was taught to hate. Maybe pink was never the problem.
Maybe it was the world that forgot how powerful softness could be.
Published – July 27, 2025 03:00 am IST