Unbecoming the Princess: My Journey Beyond the Mold
Chapter 1: The Geometry of Obedience
If I hadn't chosen to skip my dream of becoming an engineer, maybe I wouldn't have had the chance to uncover the inner system that turned my life around.
Growing up, I was thoroughly convinced that engineering wasn't girly enough for me. I was raised to believe I was a princess—and princesses just didn't do stuff like that. No one ever asked why. Girls all over the world were sold the same dream: wear fancy dresses, tiaras, and jewelry, be served by everyone around, and do nothing but look glamorous to be traded off for family connections.
Later, that same "princess" concept was used in regular families to raise obedient girls. I was the most obedient one in my family. Rebellious thoughts never even crossed my mind. Under the umbrella of love, my father picked everything for me. He passed away before picking a husband, but I dutifully kept going down that path with a man who had the exact same mindset—someone who wouldn’t accept anything less than total obedience, even if he demanded it gently. I'll never know if that gentleness would've disappeared if I'd ever tried to say "NO."
Going back to that geometric mindset I always had, I realized it was different from my mathematical side—the one behind my logical thinking and language skills, which always made me good at math and grammar.
Contrary to my father's plans—and his warnings that teaching wasn't right for a lady and would make her "bossy" (the princess complex strikes again)—I became a school teacher. Right after graduating with a degree in business and accounting, when I was supposed to take a bank job as planned, I applied at a language school for a managerial role instead.
It was agreed at the end of the interview that I was to teach English, except that I overshared my other skills and claimed that I could teach math!
The principal didn't promise anything before meeting the math supervisor first to confirm I could do it. That was the first time I realized the impact of oversharing information with others, something I regretted later. Anyways, it sure opened the main timeline that drove me here to this very moment.
After meeting the supervisor, I was officially announced as the new math teacher in the elementary school, saying goodbye to teaching English. As I found out later, the elementary headmistress didn't like the school principal much and always sought to prove her wrong. She later said to my supervisor in front of me, about a new teacher: "I don't like her English! Take her to the math department."
I never got over that for a very long time. I spent almost three academic years teaching math with a lump in my throat.
I didn't stop trying to teach English. Although I love math, I hated teaching it. It simply wasn't my thing to deal with its bad reputation of being the most difficult subject for students. English was always different. In a language school, parents never complained that their children hated English; it was prestigious to pretend English was never a problem—the impact of the superior foreign language. But math is always a subject of tension, and no mother would feel less than if she frankly announced that she hated math. It was a clear act of avoiding responsibility to help their children at home, leaving it all for me to bear. It was one of the clearest roles of a victim I tended to play for a long time.
Little did I know, entering that classroom was My Very First Unscripted Act of Rebellion.
Later, after many years, I discovered it wasn't English specifically that I wanted to teach. That discovery came after a long journey with foreign languages that started quite early in my childhood.
This chapter of my ongoing memoir series __ is based on my book The System: A Map to Inner Liberation and the Restoration of Sovereignty.
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