For the Hyacinth Who Waits

I’ve watched people leap into action the moment someone asks them to. Just a spark, small and unexpected, and suddenly, they’re alive again. Reading a whole book in one sitting because someone randomly gifted it to them. Singing a complicated melody just because someone said, ''this is one of my favorites." Dancing again, after years, just because a friend from college said, "remember how beautifully you used to move?" All of it, on impulse. A switch flipped by someone else’s words.

It fascinates me. And if I’m honest, it confuses me. It’s like they were all waiting. Until one day, the seasons shift, and a restless birdie pokes them, and whispers, ''hey, spring is here.. bloom.'' And just like that, a purple hyacinth opens its petals.

Why did I write hyacinth, and not a rose or a marigold or a lily? I don’t know. Hyacinth just walked in. Maybe, I was thinking of one of those characters in Bridgerton. The youngest, Hyacinth Bridgerton. The one always at the edge of the frame. A side character to everyone else’s story. The one who blooms only in the seventh book. Or season seven, if you're more Netflix than novels. 

Which, now that I think about it, makes ‘season’ a bit of a pun. Funny how language is in on the secret before you are. Some people don’t bloom in spring. They bloom in season ten episode six. Or after ten years and six days of silence.

I am always curious to know the secret lives people, specifically women, live, when in hibernation. Like... do they think about themselves, what they were, what they are, what they might be. I have asked a few, and almost all of them said, "we don't think much". Okay, my bad!

We are too familiar with the story of Mallan and Mathevan—two close friends on a journey who lost their way in a forest. Suddenly, a bear appeared. Mallan, strong and agile, climbed a tree. Mathevan had no such option. He dropped to the ground, held his breath, and played dead. The bear came close, sniffed him, and moved on. 

Psychologists today might call this the 'freeze' response—part of the fight-flight-fawn-freeze spectrum. When faced with persistent emotional, social, or systemic overwhelm, people do one of the four. When neither resistance nor escape feels possible, like Mathevan, people play dead. Numbness becomes a form of preservation. 

Alright, but what if the bear never leaves?

For many women, freeze is the culmination of living in a world that demands they be everything for everyone, except fully themselves. And underneath this psychic numbing is something more insidious: the quiet theft of the 'relational self'.

Carol Gilligan’s pioneering work in the late 20th c. pointed that women's sense of self and moral compass is often intertwined to their relation with others. That is, they identify themselves only in relation to others, be it their partners, kids, family, or friends, and is often operating on 'if-then' conditions. While relational self can nurture empathy, thereby community, it also makes women susceptible to being co-opted by systems larger than themselves. Self sacrifice becomes a key aspect in keeping their moral compass northward. What begins as care soon becomes obligation. What begins as connection hardens as compliance.

Sometimes I feel a deep anger—I write so much about my womenfolk. I speak out. But why do they disappoint me in ways I don’t fully understand? They say, "We don’t care what these theorists argue. We only understand love and care. Since when did loving my family and sacrificing for them become something bad and unhealthy?" 

 

I want to shake them. I want to state: If you can understand something as abstract as love, then surely you can grasp something as concrete as freedom. I want to push further: do you know how many generations of women pushed against stone walls, how much they endured, just to win you the right to speak, to learn, to live without apology? 

And yet… I also know this isn’t really their fault. When you grow up being told (explicitly and implicitly) that your worth lies in your giving, of course theory will sound foreign. Of course care will feel sacred and resistance will feel selfish. Sacrifice will feel like virtue, not violence. The 'if-then' conditions on which women operate makes it impossible for anything else to occupy space. 

Fine. But what about your body?

Your body, ladies. The one you try to ignore until it aches. Ask any woman in silence long enough and you’ll hear it: the back pain that never goes away, the nights of sleep they haven’t had in years, the ache they ignored because someone else needed dinner or comfort or sex or silence. And always the same refrain: It’s for my family. 

No. It doesn’t stop there. Because once your body is trained to give, it doesn’t know how to stop. It forgets how.

As I was writing this, I kept remembering the recurring number of articles I have read over the past few months. Different contexts, different countries, but a familiar pattern. Conservative institutions—states, religious authorities, far-right movements—converging on the instrumentalization of women’s bodies for demographic projects. The state frames the issue in economic terms: aging populations, labour shortages, unsustainable pension systems. The religion invokes moral panic: the collapse of the family, loss of traditional values, abortion as a moral failing. The far-right layers on racial and national identity: a fear of demographic replacement by immigrants. And even new movements like longtermism asking present-day individuals to make sacrifices for hypothetical people centuries down the line. In practice, this too lands squarely on women's lap. She is asked to defer her life—not even to known others, but to imagined future beings whose existence becomes more valued than her actual one. 

You relate to the nation, when told to bear more children for the economy (holds true for religion too). You relate to culture, when asked to dress modestly to uphold tradition. You relate to religion and God, when your sacrifice is proclaimed sacred. You relate to legacy, when you are told to honour the women who endured before you—by enduring more. You relate even to the unborn, when ideologies argue that your womb must serve hypothetical futures. 

What if this bear never leaves? 

Or better, what if a hyena comes!?

Will you play dead until you are actually dead?

You freeze, thinking it’s temporary. Just until the danger passes. Just until the children grow up. Just until someone says it’s your turn. But what if no one ever does?

Do you feel like I'm telling your story? No, woman. It is another woman's story, from another corner of the world. Let's say, of a woman in a Saudi province, sent to one of its infamous ‘rehabilitation’ centres for disobedience, where she is no longer called by her name, but as number 35. Beaten and starved and reformed into submission. Or of another woman in South Sudan, where armed groups treat her body as battleground, and her little sisters are taken and turned into property.. where childbirth happens in the wild because the clinics were torched.. where survival means silence, and silence means staying alive.

But even there, I read stories of women who rebuild clinics with bare hands and teach in underground classrooms. They pass notes, medicines, lullabies. They memorize each other’s names so the world won’t forget.

And here you are —

You, who were never whipped into obedience. You, who were not married off at thirteen. You, whose cage may have no bars but is shaped by expectations, doubts, and quiet fears. You, who keep waiting for someone to say, "Now, go ahead, live."

Different worlds, different battles. 

But if she, stripped of everything, still says no, what’s stopping you? Sitting in a house with books on the shelf, your phone charged, your voice intact, your heart whispering, "Not this life, not like this"?

The bear might not leave.

The world might never say it’s your turn.

Enough of playing dead. Enough of calling numbness devotion. You don’t need permission. You don’t need spring. Hyacinth, open your petals! Even in season ten. Even after ten years and six days of silence. Even now.