Simply as a Woman

A few hours before my husband was due to travel, I suddenly experienced a panic attack.

It was not the first panic attack I had ever had, but this one felt different. The feeling was strangely familiar. In the middle of it, while my heart was racing and my thoughts were spiralling, a memory surfaced with clarity.

I had felt this before. Not during a difficult period at work. Not during one of life's many disappointments. I had felt it when my father died.

Suddenly, I got a vivid memory of me that day and everything fell into place.

For years, I knew that I carried a fear of abandonment somewhere inside me. I knew that our childhood experiences do not simply disappear; they become part of the invisible architecture through which we perceive the world, ourselves, and the people we love. I understood this intellectually. Yet understanding something and truly recognizing it are two very different things.

My upbringing gave me many gifts. The German School taught me discipline, responsibility, and the value of hard work. Rhythmic gymnastics taught me commitment, perseverance, and resilience. These experiences shaped much of who I became.

But there were other lessons too. Quieter lessons. More painful ones.

My father died when I was sixteen years old, the day before my final Arabic examination. Such was the culture of discipline and achievement that surrounded me that I still went to the exam the following morning. I sat there in the classroom, staring at the paper, unable to write a single word.

Thankfully, the exam was rescheduled given my cricumstances.

Looking back, I realize that something else began that day. Not just grief, but a journey of learning how to navigate life without the person who had always represented safety, certainty, and protection. It was also the day I unconsciously stepped into adulthood. At sixteen, I began carrying responsibility for myself in a way I never had before. The loss of my father did not simply leave an absence; it required me to become my own source of certainty, strength, and direction long before I was ready. At sixteen, I suddenly found myself standing at the edge of adulthood. While other young women were gradually discovering independence, mine arrived all at once, wrapped in loss.

Life moved forward, as it always does. I studied, worked, built a career, travelled, founded organizations, completed a PhD, raised a son, and learned to carry responsibilities that often felt larger than myself. From the outside, it may have appeared that I had adapted remarkably well.

And perhaps I had. But adaptation is not always the same as healing. Sometimes we become so skilled at functioning that we forget there are parts of ourselves still waiting to be understood.

What struck me during that panic attack was not the fear itself. It was the realization that my body remembered something that my mind had long stopped questioning. Somewhere deep inside, the departure of someone I love still awakens the memory of the first person I lost.

Grief has its own language. It leaves traces in the nervous system, teaching us to anticipate loss long after the original event has passed. Sometimes the body reacts before the conscious mind understands why.

For the first time, I was able to look at that fear with curiosity rather than judgment. Not as weakness. Not as insecurity. But as a sixteen-year-old girl who lost her father and learned, perhaps too early, that the people we love can disappear.

The week following my husband's departure was a strange one. I was too afraid to listen. I still resisted. The feeling that surfaced during the panic attack kept returning unexpectedly. Alongside it came an unfamiliar sense of grief. I would find myself crying suddenly, often without any apparent reason. It lingered for days. I felt as though I was mourning something, yet I could not identify what it was. The sadness seemed larger than the present moment and deeper than the circumstances could explain.

At the time, I did not understand it. I only knew that something inside me was asking to be felt.

It is only now, as I write these words, that I begin to understand. Perhaps what I was grieving was not the journey, the distance, or even the temporary absence itself. Perhaps I was grieving an old wound that had never fully been acknowledged. A loss that I had learned to live with, but had never truly sat beside long enough to understand.

And perhaps this is why the feeling returned. Not to hurt me, but to invite me to listen.

As I grew older and began to better understand my femininity, I also began to understand the delicate balance between the feminine and the masculine within all of us. Like many women, I found myself reflecting on the experiences that shape a girl's sense of self, her confidence, her worth, and the way she eventually shows up in relationships.

And when I looked back, I found something unexpected. A blank space.

I would often find myself searching my memory, trying to retrieve moments from my childhood that seemed to come so naturally to others. Memories of being my father's little princess. Memories of being told I was beautiful. Memories of being admired, encouraged, or simply seen through the eyes of a loving father. The small moments that many daughters carry with them for life; the compliment about how they look, the pride in a father's voice when speaking about them, the reassurance that they are special, cherished, and enough.

I would squeeze my brain trying to find those memories.

But I can't.

Maybe our relationship was shaped by a different reality. A reality in which discipline, responsibility, and achievement often took center stage. I started rhythmic gymnastics at a very young age, joined the national team soon after, and spent more than eleven years moving between school, training halls, competitions, and the relentless pursuit of excellence. Ours was not a childhood built around princess stories and bedtime conversations. It was a childhood built around schedules, commitment, performance, and hard work.

A reality where love was present, but not always expressed in ways that a young girl could easily recognize or store away as part of her emotional foundation.

And perhaps that is why, when people speak about being their father's little princess, I find myself searching for memories that never quite come into focus. Not because my father did not love me, but because the language of love in our family was often spoken through responsibility, sacrifice, and providing rather than through words, affection, or affirmation.

Only much later did I begin to wonder how differently a girl understands her femininity when she grows up hearing that she is beautiful, cherished, admired, and special. How much of a woman's confidence is shaped by being seen through the loving eyes of her father. And whether some of the things I struggled with later in life were not signs of weakness at all, but simply the result of trying to build certain parts of myself without having first experienced them.

Looking back now, I can see how that absence quietly followed me into my adult life.

For years, I made choices in relationships that I did not fully understand at the time. I often confused being needed with being loved. I tolerated things I should not have tolerated. I accepted less than I deserved because, deep down, I was still trying to answer questions I did not even know I was carrying.

It took me many years to understand how important the father-daughter relationship can be in shaping a woman's sense of worth.

A father is often the first man through whose eyes a girl learns to see herself. Through his presence, his words, his attention, and his affection, she begins to form her earliest understanding of what love feels like, what respect looks like, and what she should expect from the people who enter her life later. He becomes, in many ways, the first mirror through which she discovers her value.

When that foundation is weakened, interrupted, or absent, a woman may spend years trying to build it elsewhere.

Not consciously.

But in the choices she makes, the relationships she pursues, the behavior she accepts, and the love she believes she deserves.

For a long time, I thought my mistakes in relationships were simply bad decisions or even bad luck. Looking back now, I see something more complex. I see a young woman who was successful in many areas of life, yet still trying to understand her own worth. Someone who knew how to work hard, achieve, persevere, and carry responsibility, but who had never fully learned that she did not have to earn love by proving herself.

Perhaps that is why understanding our stories matters. Because until we understand where our beliefs about ourselves came from, we often continue living them long after the circumstances that created them have passed.

And perhaps healing is not only about grieving what we lost. Maybe it is also about finally giving ourselves the understanding, reassurance, and compassion that we spent years searching for elsewhere.

So why now?

Why, after all these years, am I finally allowing myself to see this story differently?

Part of the answer lies in the past few weeks. Since that panic attack, I have carried a deep sense of grief that seemed to arrive from nowhere. There were days when it sat in my chest like a weight. Days when I felt short of breath, not because something was physically wrong, but because something emotional was finally demanding attention. The grief kept returning, insisting on being felt.

But the answer is also much simpler.

I am forty-three years old now.

And I am tired.

Not physically tired. Soul tired.

Tired of running. Tired of proving. Tired of carrying. Tired of being strong all the time.

As I write this, I find myself looking back at that sixteen-year-old girl who walked into her Arabic final examination the day after her father died. For most of my life, I saw that story as evidence of strength. Evidence of resilience. Evidence of determination.

Today, I see it differently.

Today, I want to hold that girl by the shoulders and tell her something nobody told her at the time.

You did not have to do that.

You did not have to sit that exam.

You did not have to be brave that quickly.

You did not have to prove that you could carry on.

And most importantly, you did not have to spend the next twenty-seven years compensating for that loss through relentless hard work, achievement, responsibility, and self-reliance.

You were allowed to break.

You were allowed to need people.

You were allowed to ask for help.

You were allowed to feel entitled to care, support, protection, and tenderness.

Instead, somewhere along the way, I learned that if I worked hard enough, achieved enough, carried enough, and took care of everyone else, I would be safe.

But safety was never hidden inside achievement.

And love was never something that had to be earned.

Perhaps this reflection is arriving now because I finally have the courage to admit that the strong woman I became was built, in part, by a little girl who never had the chance to fully grieve.

And perhaps healing begins when we stop admiring our survival long enough to ask what it cost us. This is where I find myself today. Not at the end of a journey, but at the end of a long season of carrying more than I should have carried.

Because beneath the achievements, the resilience, the discipline, the leadership, and the endless ability to keep going, there was always something else.

A woman.

That word alone explains everything.

A woman is softness. A woman is tenderness. A woman is vulnerability. A woman is the desire to be seen, protected, cherished, and loved without having to earn it first. A woman is trust. A woman is surrender. A woman is the quiet confidence of knowing that she does not have to carry the entire world on her shoulders.

For so many years, I became exceptionally good at the masculine qualities that life demanded of me: strength, responsibility, performance, achievement, endurance, and self-reliance. They served me well. They helped me survive. They helped me build a life.

But survival and wholeness are not the same thing.

Somewhere along the way, the softer parts of me were left waiting. The girl who wanted reassurance. The young woman who wanted to be protected. The woman who wanted to rest. The woman who wanted to receive instead of always giving. The woman who wanted to lean instead of always standing alone.

Perhaps this grief arrived now not because something is wrong, but because something inside me is finally asking to come home.

And I am listening.

Not as a daughter. Not as a mother. Not as a wife. Not as a leader. Not as a researcher or a cultural practitioner.

Simply as a woman.

A woman who has spent a lifetime becoming strong, and who is finally learning that she is allowed to be vunerable too.