It never happens with fanfare. One day, you’re just a girl running wild, dreaming large, being called beta by all those around you. The world looks at you with kindness, sometimes pampering, sometimes expectation, but mostly potential.
Then one day, in the middle of an afternoon, a child addresses you as didi.
It’s tiny, harmless even. But something shifts. The world has watched you grow, and in its eyes, you now fall into a slightly older category. Didi is not about respect, not exactly. Its placement. You’ve been placed in the middle, old enough to mentor, young enough to still be learning. You are the gap between innocence and authority.
There’s a quiet pride there, maybe. You’re someone people can count on, someone who’s worthy of admiration. But also, the dynamic shifts. You’re no longer someone the world wants to safeguard, but you’re someone it expects things from.
Just as you’re getting used to that position, attempting to strike a balance between who you used to be and who you are now, it happens again.
A small voice, perhaps on the street, perhaps in a park, addresses you as ‘Aunty’.
The first time, it’s even slightly amusing. You brush it off. “Aunty? Me?” But the label sticks. Because suddenly, you realize it’s not about age. It’s about perception. Society has silently made up its mind that you’ve transgressed yet another boundary this time, into invisibility.
Didi was still accessible. Aunty is definitive.
It’s strange how quickly admiration turns into dismissal. Didi is someone to learn from; aunty is someone to ask directions from. The same woman who once embodied curiosity and chaos now represents care and caution. Desire fades, attention drifts, and suddenly, you’ve been filed into a different category not by choice, but by habit, by a slip of the tongue, by time itself.
These labels don’t simply define years; they define perception. They put you in mind of the fact that while you lived, dreamed, evolved – the world calculated its own arithmetic, determined your place.
And perhaps that’s what hurts, not the term itself, but how casually it erases every version of you that came before.
Because sometimes, growing up isn’t about who you become, it’s about what the world starts calling you.