An unwanted girl was born

A Reflection on Survival, Womanhood, and the Price of Becoming

I was born in the early 1990s, in a city whose name I will not mention — because it could have been any city. Behind every glittering skyline and every festival that worships goddesses, there exists another kind of prayer — a silent one, made in clinics and behind closed doors: Please, let it be a boy.

But, I was not that boy.

My mother has told me the story of my birth more than once. She told it with a strange detachment, as though she were recalling the life of someone else, not her own child. She had tried to abort me, and said. “It was too late”.

Those words didn’t land all at once. They echoed over the years, shaping my understanding of love, worth, and belonging. I grew up knowing I was the accident that survived, the daughter who arrived too late to be erased.

The Weight of an Unwanted Birth

My mother had been raised to believe that daughters are burdens — expensive to marry, powerless to inherit, and destined to belong to someone else’s home. She didn’t hate me — she hated what having me meant.

I have often wondered what it must feel like for a mother to end her daughter’s life — or to watch it happen. Not every mother who gives in to that horror does so without feeling. Some, I imagine, weep until their bodies tremble, some numb themselves to survive, while some, like my own mother, bury the contradiction.

Growing Up in the Shadow of Rejection

As a child, I learned not to ask for too much. I learned to be small, to take up less space, and to speak softly. My existence felt conditional — as though I had to earn my right to be alive. Explicitly and implicitly, I was repeatedly told — You were not supposed to be here, and then, before I knew, I had internalized this dialogue and was telling it to myself.

This kind of wound doesn’t bleed; it festers. It seeps into everything — how you study, how you dream, how you love. It becomes both a burden and often a strange kind of fuel.

Fueling the Fire

When I was old enough to understand what my mother had done — and almost done — I made a quiet vow. I would prove her wrong. I would prove everyone wrong.

At first, it was not rebellion that drove me, but a desperate need for worth. I threw myself into academics and sports, clinging to the one language society respected — achievement. If being a girl made me unwanted, then I would become the kind of girl who could not be ignored.

I couldn't afford to lose, so I won every swim meet, every chess competition, and became the first female engineer in my family. I remember the day my acceptance letter arrived — the crisp white envelope from a prestigious university. My father smiled, uncertain how to express pride. My mother said nothing for a long time. Later that evening, I overheard her on the phone with a relative: “Yes, she’s going to study engineering… No, I don’t know where she got it from.”

She didn’t know that the fire came from her — from the rejection and the emptiness.

Years later, I moved overseas for work. People see the success, the titles, the shining version of my life — but they don’t see the origin story written in humiliation and survival.

They call it resilience, but I call it a lifelong attempt to justify my existence.

Sometimes, late at night, I ask myself: Is this what it takes for a woman to be seen?To build a fortress out of pain?To earn love by outperforming rejection, every single day?

I wonder what my life might have been if I had been loved freely, if I had been celebrated rather than tolerated. Would I still have become an engineer? Maybe. But perhaps I would have laughed more along the way. Perhaps I would have been driven by curiosity instead of fear. Perhaps I would have learned ambition not as self-defense, but as joy.

We celebrate the stories of women who “rose above” — who turned trauma into triumph. And yes, there is insane courage in that, but sometimes I want to ask the world: Why must we suffer to be worthy? Why must pain be the price of progress? Why?!

The Mirror of Society

My personal story is only one reflection in a much larger mirror. Across India, millions of girls were never born. Millions more were born into quiet resentment, told from their earliest years that they were liabilities.

When I think about change — real, lasting change — I no longer place my faith solely in technology or policy. I place it in education. Not the kind that fills your head with equations or theories, but the kind that opens your heart and mind.

Real education, to me, is awareness. It is the courage to question tradition and the willingness to unlearn centuries of conditioning.

In school, I learned how to solve differential equations, but no one taught me how patriarchy shapes grief, or how silence perpetuates violence. I learned the periodic table, but not how societal hierarchies poison the spirit of families and nations alike.

Because patriarchy does not just wound women; it cripples entire communities. When girls are killed or silenced, the future is impoverished — not just morally, but materially. A society that denies half its population the right to thrive cannot truly prosper. Every missing girl is not just a tragedy; she is a lost doctor, a lost artist, a lost engineer, a lost mother, a lost teacher. She is a missing possibility.

What Does It Mean to Heal?

I often think of the paradox of my existence: that I am both proof of patriarchy’s cruelty and of womanhood’s resilience. I survived not because my world was kind, but because it wasn’t. And while I have turned that survival into success, I no longer glorify the struggle. It was unnecessary and avoidable.

The measure of progress is not how many women overcome obstacles, but how few obstacles remain for them to overcome.

When I speak to younger girls now — daughters of friends, nieces, students — I tell them: You do not have to earn your right to exist. You were wanted by life itself. And that is enough.