For a long time I hated being a girl. I constantly thought my life would be so much better if I had just been born a guy!

This thought went through my head for a very long time, until about two years ago when I realized I was lacking self-love. In order for me to truly love myself I had to accept myself the way I was, which included the fact that I was a female!

Eventually more of the puzzle pieces came together, and I discovered that somewhere along the way the “woman” inside of me had decided to hide. In reality, I think I had decided to hide her. I wasn’t so sure what really had happened, but one thing I knew for sure, I had to heal my feminine energy.

But in order to heal, I had to find the root cause. Maybe it was the fact that I was surrounded by so much masculine energy my whole life. (When I was younger I spent most of my days with my dad, rather than my mom.) I also realized that I was scared of girls! I grew up with two loving parents, but my dad was on the softer side and my mom was strict. As a child, my mom seemed scary to me. So I grew up with the idea that boys were nicer than girls.

During my time in middle school I got bullied a lot, and most of the bullies were girls. My entire life I had been haunted by a scary feminine figure! This definitely started to affect the way I saw feminine energy. As I grew older and became interested in boys, I feared getting my heart broken.

(This fear came from the fact that my parents separated when I was around 7 years old.)

My defense mechanism was to act on my masculine energy. Let me clarify that I was acting upon my wounded masculine energy. A wounded masculine energy has the characteristics of being aggressive, dominant, and wants to be in control of everything. This is how I went about my relationships, because in my mind this was the only way that I’d be able to protect myself.

I wanted to be in control, I wanted the other person to love me more than what I loved them. It was a game to me, an unhealthy game. My identity was lost. I tried to regain it in all the wrong ways. I wasted so many minutes of my life stalking other girl’s social media profiles. I wanted to imitate those girls, who to me seemed like they had their feminine energy perfectly balanced.

Not only did I want to be them, but I also judged them. I felt judged, and so I judged other girls all the time. I was projecting my own insecurities onto others. I was clearly suffering from low-self esteem, and the root cause of this was lack of self-love and self-acceptance.

Eventually I came to realize that my actions were not okay. I was hurting others, and I was hurting myself more than what I was hurting them. Through years of self-abuse of my feminine energy, I lost her completely. She was nowhere to be found. I wanted to find her, I wanted to get rid of all the sadness I carried within me! In order to do so, I knew I had to mend a broken relationship- the relationship with myself, with my femininity.

I began creating my own mantras and started looking at myself in the mirror and repeating “I love you” as many times as possible. I also started hugging myself, and while doing that I vocalized the deep love that I had for me. I repeated self-love affirmations over and over again in my head.

(Might sound kinda weird, I know, but hey you gotta do what you gotta do right?)

It was a long process, and it’s still an on-going process. It wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I truly felt love for my womanly-self. It was that time of the month, I was very emotional and cried the entire day. As I was laying in bed, with horrible back pain and crying my eyes out while watching a drama, I started to laugh. I laughed because I realized how much I love being a woman. Even as I was going through what some of us ladies call “the worst days of the month,” I couldn’t help but to appreciate everything that comes with being a girl. It was a beautiful feeling, the feeling that I had been in search of for quite a while.

Slowly I remembered my divine feminine energy, I remembered her for who she truly was. She is sweet, loving, and vulnerable! She is playful, she is fearless, she speaks with the truth, she stands up for what she believes in.

She’s beautiful and smart.

The entire time I had been looking in the wrong places. I was searching for something external. I thought that make-up, clothes, and boy’s attention would somehow make her re-appear. When the only place I had to look at was within, within me. She had always been there, waiting to shine her light!

As women we have to cheer for each other, we have to root for each other! We can help each other heal. We have a special bond that ties all of us together- our divine feminine energy. She’s inside all of us! Let’s accept and nourish our feminine energy together. Set her free, let her take you into her depth- let her guide you to the most ecstatic ride you’ll ever experience and never regret.

“Feminine power is silent, dark, mysterious, healing, nurturing. A woman can walk into a room and control it. She doesn’t even have to open her mouth if she knows where her power is.”

— Iyanla Vanzant