Sometimes I wonder why, after all these years, being a woman still feels like walking on a road that keeps asking for permission.

Reading Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 felt like looking into a mirror I never asked to stand in front of.

Ji-young is ordinary — painfully so — yet in her quiet unraveling, I found pieces of every woman I have ever known.

The exhaustion.

The politeness.

The constant need to endure.

The book doesn’t shout — it whispers.

It doesn’t dramatize her suffering, it simply list what she has endured.

And that simplicity hits harder than any tragedy.

It’s not the one big heartbreak, but thousands of small ones — 

written like medical notes, symptoms of deeper disease we’ve normalized for generations: 

that women must be kind but not too assertive, capable but not too ambitious, strong but never tired.

This book didn’t comfort me — it reminded me.

That anger can be quiet.

That pain can be polite.

And that survival itself can be a form of rebellion.

Maybe that’s what Ji-young —and many women out there — wanted all along — 

not sympathy, not praise — just the freedom to exist without explanation.

And maybe that’s what I want too.

To forgive myself for not being perfect, for being angry, for being exhausted— 

for never feeling the urgency to explain why.