Environment As Destiny

A reflection on Ferrante, womanhood, and the quiet rebellion of shaping our own destinies.

While reading My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, I kept thinking about the idea of environment as destiny, how the place we’re born, the family we come from, and the expectations surrounding us can shape the paths we take.

In Ferrante’s world, Elena is doing everything “right,” studying, striving, reaching for something beyond the narrow streets of Naples, but the weight of her environment, and of being a woman in 1950s Italy, presses against her at every turn. Her education gives her wings, but the air around her makes it hard to lift off.

That tension, between who we might become and the world that tells us who we’re allowed to be, stayed with me. This poem grew out of that space: a reflection on the women who rise in spite of circumstance, and on what it means to claim our own destinies, even when the odds are uneven.

ENVIRONMENT AS DESTINY

Does the place we’re born decide who we become,
how far we’ll go, even before we take our first breath?

If so, how do we explain Hamilton, Lincoln, Schwarzenegger—
men who rewrote the scripts they were handed?
And why, I wonder, are my examples all men?

Are they the only ones allowed to be outliers?
Is danger itself gendered,
its weight falling heavier on girls who learn too early
how the world can bruise and bind them?

Can we not rise from the ashes too,
not as symbols, but as selves,
manifesting our own destinies,
our own definitions of greatness?

Don’t get me wrong,
I know there are women who have risen,
who knew how to defy gravity and expectation:
Maya Angelou. Frida Kahlo. Malala Yousafzai.

Women who rose in spite of circumstance,
who carried the weight of inequality
and still created, still spoke, still burned bright.

But there are far fewer women
who have surfaced in the story of history,
their names scattered between the long lists of men,
their stories told less often,
their triumphs softly echoing across oceans and continents.

Let these few teach us what it means to rise,
to educate ourselves, to speak for ourselves,
to create something larger than the self,
to become who we are, despite where we begin.

And I, too, am learning to rise,
to unlearn the limits I was handed.
So I write—
not to rewrite history,
but to widen it,
to leave space for the women still becoming,
myself among them.