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In my life, I have heard many phrases that make a lot of noise in my head and sound loud. They are phrases or expressions that today, at 25 years of age, I no longer have consideration for. I no longer pay attention to them. However, I know that other young people who have grown up with these poor ideas have not had the opportunity to see, hear, or question other realities completely different from those society imposes.

One of the ideas that society imposes on you is how women should be seen in society, in the family, and above all, what their mission in life should be—such as marriage, motherhood, and how women should look physically. As the daughter of Catholic parents, I was taught the stages of life: We are born, grow up, graduate, get married, have children, and die. It seems like a joke that so many people do not question the origin of all that.

While we grow up, we question all those teachings that our parents and family transmit to us. They say the mission in life for every woman is to have children, to be a mother. But this is not the mission. The mission in life for all people is always to act from love. Today, we women no longer think like we used to; we no longer think about pleasing other people, which seems great to me.

One situation that I observed in my family was that my aunt, who was 34 years old, was questioned: “Why aren’t you getting married?” Or they made comments, like one typical of my country, “The train is passing you by.” I realized that my aunt felt uncomfortable with these questions. From that, I managed to understand the subject of marriage from another perspective, and I was able to question it very closely. Society tells women: Marriage after the age of 30 is an obligation if you already have a boyfriend. From my point of view, it doesn’t have to be that way. The aunt I’m talking about is not married today, and you can’t imagine how many more times my family kept asking her the same question. 

To finish, I want to emphasize that the success of all people is seen in different ways, and we have to know how to respect this. Maybe what for me is not success, for the other person is, and that is totally valid. We shouldn’t judge anyone for their dreams or goals because their life is not ours.

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Sophia Gallardo Espejo emigrated from Piura, Peru, to the U.S. in 2021. A speaker of Spanish, English, and Japanese, she studies at the Queens Public Library’s Peninsula Adult Literacy Center. Her teacher is James McMenamin, and the site adviser is Barbara Miller. Sophia Gallardo Espejo writes, “I studied business administration in my country. I love reading in the middle of the night with silence all around me.”