The Weight We Never Asked For - by Inioluwa Adeyeye

When you are born a girl child, something is taken from you before you even understand the world. A softness is stripped, a freedom is stolen, and a quiet warning settles over your life: *be careful, you are already at a disadvantage.* And when you are born a girl child in Africa, that disadvantage is not subtle. It is loud. It is present. It is everywhere. It stretches into your childhood, shadows your growth, and sits with you like a second skin. It is the whisper behind every “don’t,” the reason behind every “you can’t,” and the invisible fence you learn to navigate long before you learn to dream. Girls have to fight for what others receive as birthrights. We fight for safety. We fight for education. We fight for dignity. We fight simply to be seen as human. And even when we climb with all our strength, with all our hope—there is still that weight, tugging, dragging, insisting that we remember our place. But what haunts me most is this: Even with all this heaviness, we still have a chance. A chance to breathe. A chance to try. A chance to rise, even if the rise is slow and bruised. Because I know someone who never got that chance. I know a girl whose dreams never made it past childhood because her childhood was stolen. A girl whose voice was cut short before it learned courage. A girl who prayed for rescue in a world that never learned to listen to girls like her. She lived in a home where silence was survival. She walked in a community where her body was seen as a responsibility, not a life. She carried burdens that should never belong to a child—burdens forced on her by tradition, by poverty, and by adults who forgot that girls are human beings before they are anything else. She didn’t get to grow. She didn’t get to choose. She didn’t get to fight. Her tragedy is not unique. And that is the most painful part. There are millions like her, millions of girls swallowed by systems so cruel that their suffering becomes normal, invisible, and expected. Girls whose hopes die quietly behind closed doors. Girls who disappear into early marriages, unconsented motherhood, silence, or violence. Girls whose names we will never know, whose stories end long before the world gives them a chance to begin one. Compared to them, our pain, real as it is, feels like a privilege.Our struggles—heavy as they are—feel like blessings. Because at least we are allowed to fight. Thinking of them breaks something inside me. It forces me to confront the truth of what it means to be born a girl in certain places. It forces me to admit that survival, for many girls, is not a right but a miracle. And so we carry their memory like a flame. We fight louder because they could not whisper. We climb higher because they were kept on the ground. We speak boldly because their silence was imposed, not chosen. If we cannot save those who were lost, then we must honor them. We must refuse to let their stories fade into the background noise of injustice. We must become the echo of every girl whose voice was taken. To be born a girl is to inherit a weight. To carry it is painful. To rise with it is powerful. And to fight for those who didn’t make itthat is how we turn pain into purpose. and suffering into something that refuses to die quietly.

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