Sometimes we meet women in pages.

Not in person…but on pages.

Yeah, you read correctly.

I said pages.

In books, essays, interviews, captions, fragments of thought written by strangers who somehow understand us better than people we’ve known for years.

When we read about these women, the way in which their internal thoughts are written bring a feeling of…relief.

Like recognition.

Like proof that what we feel is not strange, or excessive, or untranslatable after all.

And for a long time, I thought that was enough: to find those women.

To be comforted by them.

To borrow strength from their words and move on.

But over time, the same question repeated in my head, over and over.

What if I became that woman for someone else?

Not in a perfect, polished way. Not as an ideal. But as something honest. Something lived-in. Something that says: I was here, and I felt this too.

Sometimes, you come across women who teach you how to survive heartbreak, failure, ambition, loneliness, becoming.

They don’t always offer solutions. Sometimes they simply name things you thought were only yours. And when that thing is named, something loosens.

Breaks loose.

I remember reading sentences that felt like being seen without asking for it. Paragraphs that described parts of me I hadn’t yet learned how to articulate. Voices that made me feel less alone in my own mind.

But I also remember the silence after the book closed.

Because eventually, you have to live your own life again. You have to become the person who is no longer being directly spoken to.

And that is where something shifts.

There is a point where reading is no longer enough.

Where inspiration stops being passive and becomes directive. Where you start to realise that admiration is not the final destination.

It’s a sign.

A sign that says: you recognise this voice because it exists in you too.

To become the woman you needed to read doesn’t mean imitating someone else’s voice. It means you have to stop editing your own.

It is to write the sentence you wish someone had written to you earlier.

To say the thing you once needed permission to feel.

To articulate what you once thought was too messy, too emotional, too uncertain to be made real.

It is, in a lot of ways, an act of return.

Returning to yourself.

There is often a gap between the version of ourselves that moves through the world and the version of ourselves that needed comfort, language, or clarity.

One is shaped by survival. The other is shaped by care.

Becoming the woman I needed to read has meant learning to bridge that gap. Not by erasing who I was, but by finally offering her something she did not receive at the time: understanding without judgement.

It has meant writing without asking first if it is “too much.”
It has meant speaking without translating myself into something more digestible.
It has meant trusting that clarity does not require perfection.

I used to think writing was about expression.

Now I understand it is also about repair.

Not in the sense of fixing what was broken, but in the sense of re-seeing it. Reframing it. Giving it language that allows it to exist without shame.

When I write now, sometimes I think about the versions of me who would have needed these words earlier. The younger selves who were trying to make sense of themselves in environments that did not always offer language for what they were carrying.

And I realise that writing forward is also writing backward.

It reaches across time.

There is no final version of the woman I needed to read.

She is not a finished character. She is not an endpoint. She is a practice.

Some days she’s confident. Some days she’s uncertain but honest. Some days she is still learning how to take up space without apologising for the noise of it.

But what defines her is not perfection.

It is permission.

Permission to exist fully in her own voice.

Permission to change.

Permission to be witnessed, even by herself.

Maybe the women we needed to read were never separate from us.

Maybe they were always fragments of what we were becoming.

And maybe, in writing ourselves honestly, without shrinking, without editing too quickly, without waiting for permission, we become part of that same lineage.

Not just readers of other women’s stories.

But authors of our own.

And for someone, somewhere, exactly what they needed to find.

The journey of becoming never truly ends. Who was the woman you needed to read about when you were younger and how are you becoming her now?

Share your reflections below. I’d love to hear the stories, books, and voices that have shaped you.

See you in the next one!

– Bibi x