this one's for the girls

This one’s for the girls.

During my first year of college, I was told by the smallest man who ever lived that I wasn’t interesting enough—that if I wanted to remain desirable in his eyes, I needed to seem as if I would hop a fence and chain-smoke cigarettes atop the local parking structure. Less Rory Gilmore meets Charlotte York and more Penny Lane meets Ramona Flowers.

But while nicotine made me nauseous and my fear of getting arrested for trespassing was enough to send me home, I knew I could always at least look the part. I could wear oversized, thrifted jackets with a patchwork of pins I had dutifully collected from flea markets. I could shove my Brandy basics to the back of my closet in exchange for esoteric, overpriced graphic tees. I could wear the perfect pair of low-rise jeans he’d later ask me to unzip in his dimly lit bedroom that, in retrospect, smelled less like patchouli oil and more like literal ass.

Trying to fit a male fantasy was not only a Sisyphean feat but one of the quickest ways to resent myself within the female collective. In many ways, I find the whole manic pixie dream girl trap to be more destructive than the usual societal pressures women face regarding appearance. Both are, at their core, mechanisms of control—sadistic in their demand for conformity—but the former, with its carefully crafted, unattainable allure, has a way of sinking deeper.

Getting told, “You’re not like other girls,” is, after all, not a compliment but an erasure; a cruel devaluation of every woman around me, an implicit suggestion that my worth lay in my rejection of the very collective from which I came. To be “different” was to be better, and to be better was to be apart.

I became increasingly isolated from what had once been my closest female friendships. To this day, it still pains me, and I think of it often, especially when I recall this quote from Jane Fonda: “Women sit facing each other, eye to eye, and they say, I'm in trouble. I need you. Can you help me?”

So much of what I was going through at the time—what I didn’t have the words or the clarity to express—could have been soothed with little more than a cup of peppermint tea and a friend to share my sorrows with. But, as it so often goes, I had become so adept at making myself available to men—ready to be whoever they wanted me to be at a moment’s notice—that I had come to take for granted the simple, cosmic balm of female companionship.

The girl I became—one whose sole purpose seemed to be meeting someone else’s desires—wasn't really a person at all but a performance. She was, at best, a simulacrum of selfhood, built to fulfill an ideal that was as elusive as it was insatiable.

I know what you’re thinking: Why did I do it? Why did I give so much of myself away, piece by piece, until there was little left to surrender? Surely I must have known how damaging it would be. My first question would be: Have you ever been a 19-year-old girl? And my second: Have you never, at any point, reshaped yourself—just slightly, just enough—in the hope of gaining something? Approval, affection. The thrill of being seen.

The cost of this game we as humans play is rarely obvious—small concessions, subtle shifts in who we are, until one day the person staring back at you in the mirror appears unrecognizable. I find that for women especially, the pressure to posture oneself—be it as the cool girl, the girl next door, or whatever other fucked-up archetype they’ve created for us—is particularly devastating due to its insidious nature within our society.

I’m no Pollyanna concerning my take on women’s escape from the clutches of feeling the need to fit a certain role. I understand it’s never a linear path to true freedom as it relates to most identity struggles imposed by society. If anything, I felt the need to write this entire piece in the first place because I still sometimes catch myself internalizing these pressures.

Consider my reflection here a self-aware, almost preemptive step; a way of keeping myself from falling back entirely into the position I found myself in 3 and a half years ago.

What I will say, however, is that I find great solace now more than ever during the moments in which young girls and women are allowed the space to be themselves. Not curated versions of themselves, not filtered or manicured into what they’re told they should be—but themselves, as they truly are, unapologetically. My favorite of these moments are, although not limited to:

During the undeniable and inviolable sense of collective catharsis that is felt through the crowd at the concert of a successful female artist.
When you reach the age at which you realize that other women are not the enemy, nor are they your competition. Becoming, if you weren’t one already, a girl’s girl.
When women find the courage to decenter men from their lives, not out of embarrassment or disdain, but simply as a healthy boundary and necessary act of self-love.
When we realize that we were always cool to begin with, that we never needed a man to confirm this to us.

And just, I love it when women…