"I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows... the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored"

A voice awakens to self-recognition, not as a fixed essence but as a horizon. To “begin to perceive” implies a slow unfolding rather than a revelation; womanhood is emerging in the speaker’s field of vision, not handed down as an immutable truth. The phrase carries both tenderness and skepticism: the self is felt before it is defined. “What that is, heaven knows” sounds like modesty, yet it also pricks at the presumed authorities, religion, tradition, common sense, who claim to know. If heaven knows, does anyone on earth? The line wagers that the established definitions of woman are insufficient, perhaps even irrelevant to lived experience.

“The philosophy is yet to be written” names a vacuum and a provocation. It suggests that the existing systems of thought have not given full account of female subjectivity, that the canon has described women but not from within their consciousness. Writing the philosophy becomes both intellectual and existential labor: to invent new concepts through which a woman can think herself, and to let life itself revise those concepts. This resonates with a shift from being to becoming, from category to process. The speaker does not accept an inherited script; she announces a blank page that invites authorship.

“There is a world to be explored” moves the inquiry from definition to action. Exploration turns the woman from object into agent, traveler, cartographer of terrains no one mapped because no one allowed her to travel. The world is both external, institutions, work, love, power, and internal, desire, fear, memory, body. The tone is not merely defiant; it is curious, even joyful. Uncertainty becomes possibility. Rather than a confession of ignorance, the statement is an ethics of discovery: approach the self with patience, invent the tools you need, accept that the path will be made by walking. Womanhood here is not a limit but a frontier, calling for courage, language, and a community of co-authors.