What they say about women having a shelf life, everything they said was true, all the women who I scorned for inhaling the patriarchal ideas of a sell-by date, the ‘ripeness’ of women, the ‘freshness’, my mother who told me to pick carefully, they were right and now I have to make a concerted effort to stem the tsunami of fear at being imprisoned by my gender—which now means not having any control over the meaning of myself.
