I grew up in a cult where being feminine was not only encouraged but enforced.

Cutting your hair and dressing in shorts or pants were not allowed and if you did dress like that, you were shunned and punished for it.

I had no say in my life or body. I was treated as an object and sexually abused whenever any male felt like it, then punished for speaking out about it. I was taught that my purpose was to service men, have babies at 16 and be happy and thankful for any sexual encounter experienced. If I didn't like it, it was my own fault.

I lived my whole childhood in fear of sexual assaults, wishing I was a boy.

As I got to my teenage years I found safety in looking like a boy. I dressed like them, I got punished with them, & hid my female traits with baggy clothes and short hair.

While there is nothing wrong with dressing and looking this way, as I got older I felt I was doing myself a disservice resisting my feminine side. I was scared of embracing my own feminine power. I’ve always been a tomboy, had short hair and wear minimal make up. That’s just who I am. But on the inside I felt I needed a better balance between masculine and feminine. I knew I needed to let go of my childhood fears of appearing too feminine, too vulnerable, too "soft". In order to do that, however, I first had to work on healing my childhood traumas.

In 2019 I started a journey of getting back in touch with my feminine side. It was the year I started loving my body at whatever state it’s in, the year I truly started rooting for every female around me, the year I built my own beautiful female support group, and the year I started to step into my feminine energy to learn what it truly meant to be a woman, embrace my sexuality, my body, my powers and everything I and society tells you what's wrong with yourself.

Femininity comes in many forms. Sure, it's being comfortable in your own skin, but it's also embracing the flow of life, going through hardships and challenges and coming out not hardened but softer and kinder. It’s being in touch with your emotions, open to transformation and understand that you don’t have to do it all, it’s OK to ask and accept help. It's embracing what it means to be a woman. To own your sexuality, work with the feminine 30 day lunar cycle of the moon, not the masculine solar 24 hours cycle of the sun.

There is so much more I have to learn about my own feminine power. But every year I am able to look back and see how far I've come.

These pictures are not comparisons of before and after, but to show how we can grow, how we can learn, how we can evolve. It's to show that as humans it is our right and gift to be able to transform ourselves again and again.