10 windows into the girly life i craved but never got (until now 💖)
the writer girlies who help me embrace my true authentic life (plus some thoughts on the patriarchy's agenda: the obliteration of girls)
1. theater (and the obliteration of girls)
if you’re not reading
, you should be:her writing is an example of the criticized “diary writing” for which so many people are rightfully paying money. no, thank you, we are not forking over 27 dollars a month anymore to doom scroll on a news app: we have diaries now, and we love them: they make us feel good, and they turn us into our best selves. plus they’re fun.
my new fairy ring is everything
there are so many reasons to love these types of diary entries, but i stumbled across one in particular while reading adalyn’s blog this morning as i tried to start the day. adalyn writes about crying at frozen the musical. and she wasn’t crying simply because it was such a good performance:
When I was thirteen, I got to be in a production of Frozen (admittedly the junior version), and it completely changed my life.
I remember the opening night of Frozen Jr. was the most thrilling feeling I’ve ever experienced. There was such an exciting feeling backstage, and we all went around wishing each other a thousand broken legs and telling all of our best inside jokes. The curtain rose for the opening number, and I was clutching my green ribbon on the maypole fiercely, determined to do my very best work. In that moment, I truly felt like I was part of something important and special, which is a feeling that isn’t easily replaceable. Every time I hear Vuelie (the iconic Frozen na na nas), I’m whisked back to thirteen year old me onstage for the first time, feeling positively infinite. When I hear it professionally, I am reminded of the pure eagerness to perform and be onstage, and I cry.
when i read this, i remembered being 13 and wanting these types of experiences but simply feeling too afraid to pursue them.
if you didn’t read my post the agony of not being a girl, here is the first paragraph.
when i was 6 years old i sat paralyzed with the devastating realization that there was nothing i could do: i could never be a girl. this awful knowledge struck me over and over again throughout the coming years of early elementary school: when i was carpooling and sitting beside a girl; when i was at school and saw the girls gathered near the swings at recess. i dreaded each haircut when i would not be able to express what i wanted. a haircut was like an all-male sports activity or a group of boys being instructed in manhood at church: a process for imposing an artificial identity upon me, and i could feel how i walked around each day as if trapped in some other life.
adalyn wrote another post that actually reminded me of my “the agony of not being a girl post.” adalyn writes in “i wish i liked a boy”:
All my life, I have adored romance. I love silly YA books and romcoms with the most beautiful, sweeping music playing while the characters finally kiss. I am the kind of person who has been talking about her wedding since the age of about five, and the type of girl who cries at wedding vows. I love writing extensive love letters and dreaming of perfect, romantic scenarios to fall asleep to. I live for love.
But I will never have it.
Not in the way most girls get to. Most get to fall in love with a boy, and live in the portrayed fantasy. It will never be mine. I wish I could like a boy, wish the fantasy could be my reality, but it won’t. This is because I can’t like boys.
i relate to this so much: that sense of being excluded from an experience you really crave. there are experiences we want so much and we will just never have them: not only because of physical limitations but because of… what we like, and what we just don’t like, and who we are, which in some ways but in many others we can’t control.
now, you say: but boys can also participate in musical theater, and this is true. but if you feel like a girl inside, and you are forced to fit within the straight jacket of a boy, then artistic expressions of all forms are quite difficult to achieve. the girl who is a girl can throw herself into a performance as elsa; the boy who is more of a girl inside must step into the theater and be surrounded on all sides by that which is forbidden her.
flowers from saturday
in tenth grade i wanted to participate in the spring musical, but i did not dare try out for any roles. to think about roles i wanted would be to think about my gender. and this i could not do. why? because once my parents had taken my flesh and molded me into an identity drone, my computer coding came equipped with a fail-safe: knee-jerk reactions against “gay stuff.”
so i tried to join the sound crew. but ultimately i did not. i did not want to sit around with all those boys. i wanted to be with the girls, but i did not feel that i could be, at least not in that setting, and so instead i became friends with a bunch of theater kids without ever actually participating in theater itself.
it hurt, honestly, sometimes, to reveal that to certain people: i’d like to perform! and have them look at me and say: “you?”
there was too much inside me to overcome: my repressed gender identity, my fundamentalist christian psychology, my undefined sadness and the insecurity i always felt… this was an insecurity that came from not being who i really was, and it was also an insecurity that came from hating the performance i was putting on while mistaking that performance for my very self.
i was in such a state psychologically that all these beautiful experiences i would have loved so much were just out of my grasp. i didn’t get them.
another reason why adalyn is so inspiring:
she’s so young, but she has embraced herself. that should inspire all of us, especially if we are much older, to have that same courage to love ourselves and celebrate ourselves and reject the shame forced upon us by others.
she spills her guts and i spill mine 💖
but the most powerful aspect of adalyn’s writing, honestly, is her willingness to sit with the complexity of her feelings. even as she embraces who she is, she is not afraid to express some sadness about what she’ll miss out on:
I’m sixteen now, and I know there is so much time to grow into who I am, and learn more about love. Sometimes, I wish my teenage naïvety would translate into realizing I truly do like boys as I age. But I also realize this naïvety is my wish that that could happen at all. I know enough about myself to know I don’t like boys, and I’m not okay with that. One day, I hope I will be.
honestly, i don’t think i’ll ever be ok with having missed out on so many experiences i would have loved when i was adalyn’s age.
but i am so happy to have found a place where i can read about these experiences from the people who did have them.
seriously, diary entries: they make me so happy. i love them. i love reading about these experiences, with all their complexities, as much as i love connecting with a fictional character in my favorite novel.
i wish i’d been socialized as a girl, but i wasn’t.
thanks for giving me such a complex window into the girly life i have to come.
with these windows into feminine experience, i do not pretend to glamorize girlhood. there is much trauma in girlhood, and that trauma is also something i missed out on, a crucial fact i must acknowledge. even so, already i have experienced hostility from others for my girly ways, and for that reason also i find so much value in reading the diary entries of those who grew up as girls.
the moment i began adorning myself with girly trinkets and colors was the moment i began receiving aggressively hateful looks from random cishet men in the street. i remember just in the last 6 weeks:
standing in the aisle of a plane while an older white man, who had been following me around the terminal with disgust, became impatient that the line ahead of me was not moving. he wanted me gone as quickly as possible. he threw his newspaper on the floor beneath his first class seat and looked around frantically as if trying to find a guard to take me away.
waiting in the pick up area of a shop while a bald boomer man simply could not take his eyes off me: he looked around in every direction, throwing his hands in the air, as if to say, “can you believe this freak is actually standing right there?” (literally everyone else was just minding their own business)
writing “when i am feeling angry i like to touch my butterfly bracelets with my fingertips” on facebook and immediately being accused of mental instanity while my great uncle was simultaneously posting this:
to my knowledge, no one has suggested to this man that he seek psychiatric help.
the contempt i’ve received from men, which is wildly outweighed by the love i’ve received from women, makes me realize why our culture hates girls. our culture hates girls simply because so many men hate girls and it is men who control our institutions.
obvious, right? yes: fucking obvious.
my dad once picked me up from the airport. i had a tote bag dangling off my arm; my arm was raised in the air. i thought nothing of it! but he did. “you look like a girl!”
additional flowers from saturday
i remember what my dad told me when i was growing my hair out. i’d never be able to have hair like that and work in the offices of a corporation like him. and it just made me think: men control this capital;1 their control of capital gives them cultural power; they use that cultural power to force masculinization upon anyone in their grasp. they use this power to obliterate girly experience. this is why my ex-friend, who also worked in a corporate office and lived in a socioeconomically upper class and homogenous neighborhood, told me “you can’t wear those bracelets because that’s something a 12 year old girl would do.”
“something a 12 year old girl to do,” i quickly discovered, was a valid reason for people to stop me from doing anything. literally: anything i wanted to do, if it was “something a 12 year old girl would do,” i was told i was not allowed to do it! or that doing it meant i must be insane!
these drones are on a mission to obliterate girly expression. that is their goal. that is their agenda. they do not need to be aware of this agenda to execute its tactics: they are automated. i see my friend in my mind and i see a robot bent on destruction. his mind scans the environment for signs of a 12 year old girl: and he obliterates.
he is executing the mission of the men who control enormous piles of capital: obliterate all girls. let them be girls until they’re 12, just so we can sell them stuff and get them addicted to consumption, but then if they want employment from us, we will obliterate them, and our employees will also obliterate them out in public.
i loved walking beneath this tree on friday
a key goal of the patriarchy is the obliteration of girly experience, girly expression, and even girly thoughts & feelings. either the “man” obliterates his own “girly” self or the professional woman leaves her girly ways in childhood. the man can continue to act in many ways like a “12 year old boy” — he can even sulk into depression for entire weeks on the basis of the performance of 18 year old football players — but the professional woman must be professional, which from the perspective of the men who control our corporations means that she must be more masculine.
this last sentence is an important one because even though i would have been closer to my authentic self had i been “born a girl,” that does not erase the reality: to be born a girl is to be subjected to extreme amounts of control and hatred. to be a girl is in many ways to struggle constantly for autonomy. i had this struggle for autonomy too, but from a different angle: having the autonomy of a “man” but seeing this autonomy as a restriction. having the autonomy of a “man” but seeing this autonomy for what it was: an externally oriented autonomy, an autonomy that granted me every imaginable freedom with regards to masculine objects and interests but no autonomy whatsoever when it came to my feelings, thoughts, clothes, or emotional expression.
for all these reasons, i do not want to cherry pick romantic visions of the girly life. i believe in authenticity: i want to share extracts with complexity and also joy; extracts that might highlight trauma and misogyny but also call girls to action to embrace themselves — their own experiences, their own desires, their own authentic expressions — and in so doing also reveal the innate absurdity of the patriarchy itself.
unfortunately, every day we must confront that absurdity in all its power.
thankfully, there is a revolution: women — and also teenage girls in their teens, twenties, thirties, and beyond — are gradually taking over the internet, driving away the darkness, basking the universe in the light of an exploding star.
and when i read these girly voices, which capture such depth of experience and emotion, it makes me think that for all the hatred toward girls kindled by the men who control capital, the truth remains:
to be a man is to be nothing, while to be a girl is to be a supernova.
(see comments: i mean this in the sense of the performance of a man 💖)
2. pleasure
:As girls, we are conditioned to believe that our pleasure is dangerous, and expressing it openly is seen as a sign of promiscuity or self-indulgence; these are evidently undesirable attributes that suggest low self-worth. We are encouraged to conceal our pleasure, lest it invite other’s uncontrollable temptation. We infer early on that the most worth our pleasure can attain, is when we hold it close to our budding chests, and share it sparingly. And between this rock and a hard place, it’s easy to conclude that it is safer to keep these things to ourselves, locked behind bitten tongues. More so, it can seem that the best option for our well-being is to remain focused on pleasing those around us, to maintain that sense of security—however false it may be.
There is a belief that a sensual, sexual, erotic, self-liberated woman is somehow less valuable in the heteronormative “market” while a caricatured version of that same woman can be idolized in media for the sake of capital. It becomes clear that pleasure-centered women are only truly deemed worthy in a performative context when created for, and aspiring to, the male gaze.
3. community
:I’m on a train heading to a weekend of oral history research training for a project I'm working on with a young women’s organisation, marking their centenary and celebrating the involvement of loads of different women over the last hundred years. v exciting, honestly, and extremely up my street. When I applied, I remember saying to them, ‘I love archives and I’d love to get in about yours’ in a manner that, immediately afterwards, I feared came across borderline lewd. but I really meant it.
4. salon
:It’s 2pm on a sunny late summer afternoon. A Diet Coke in hand, you throw on your 90s super model sunnies and strut out the salon door with 3 inches of hair gone. Your once thick, lifeless locks are now noticeably shorter, and your bob is giving you the renewed confidence of a mediocre white man.
You’re unstoppable bb.
This short haired alter ego who has just emerged is freaking cute and powerful and she’s ready to take on the world. Where to next darling? you ask yourself coyly. Is it time to shop for a whole new fall wardrobe? Do something else impulsive to match the boldness of your new hair? Get another piercing or buy a new bag perhaps? The world is your oyster babe!
5. bachelorette parties
:My best friend had her bachelorette party in Austin last week and I had what I believe to be a spiritual experience while listening to Mr. Brightside, alone, in the middle of an establishment described as “a dance club for ppl who hate dance clubs.”
In my life, I’ve encountered several emotionally significant moments soundtracked to Mr. Brightside; I’m thinking of the time I attempted to somehow grind with my ex-boyfriend during The Killers set at Lollapalooza in 2009, and also the time that, as a senior in college, I returned to the freshman dorm I oft partied at three years earlier and sat on the floor of the lobby, listening to an eighteen-year-old with an acoustic guitar sing, Jealousy, turning saints into the sea. (I cried).
The song always just comes on at the exact right time, exactly when I need it, which weirdly, I’ve learned, is always.
6. female friendship
:We put a different weight on our relationships as females, generalizing here but I think there is codependency that males don’t tend to put on their friends to give them. I don’t think it is always unhealthy, but I think the lines can get blurry and before you know it it’s hard to tell if you are stifling your bud or to tell them they are stifling you, for example. The level of depth and vulnerability is often so much, so fast or so deep for so long, that sometimes those friends know more than your partner might about you. It just hits different when your gal friend of two years ghosts you, out of nowhere without explanation and then resurfaces a year later like nothing happened. It hits different when a friendship breakup feels like a real break-up, mourning period and all. According to my husband’s experience anyway, this is not how he and his friends operate. They “say what they mean” and “mean what they say” and “don’t take it personally” when a friend moves on. Wow, must be nice.
7. fashion sense
:Truly ahead of its time. I know we deem Rachel the style icon- and she is one- but in my opinion Monica has just as many memorable moments. Take the vest she wears when having her parents over for dinner. (Mmmm, what’s that curry taste? Curry.) The cut of the vest and the tie back are reminiscent of a corset (hello, recent resurgence) and the black pants give it such a sleek look. The layered necklace is just the
currycherry on top.
8. appearance and body image
:Fillers, botox, lash lifts, and laser hair removal have become procedures women get regularly. Beauty is capital; being "pretty" or conforming to beauty standards puts you at the top of the social hierarchy. Women will do anything to reach the top. Even spend a lot of money and time that could be used for something more significant.
Being raised in a Colombian family meant that my mother and other relatives scrutinized my body from a young age. Before my communion ceremony, people started saying that I would need to drop some weight to fit into my dress. I was then put on a diet, and I was only ten years old.
9. consumption
:You need these!’ An influencer tells me through my phone screen. She pulls out a pristine pair of sand ultra-minis from their box. I love them. I have the antelope colour myself. ‘They’re so comfy, they keep your feet so warm in the winter and they go with literally everything.’ I agree. She picks up another box. ‘This is a new colour, they’re the moss green’. Fair enough, a different colour and if you wear them a lot it makes sense. She pulls out a third box. ‘This pair I’m most excited for, they’re the colour mustard seed.’ She then goes on to say she also has three other pairs of the same style from last year. That’s six pairs of the same shoes. I scroll up on her page and see another unboxing of a pair of shearling Ugg Tazz’s. What’s more, this wasn’t the first video I’d seen like it today. Whether it’s Ugg boots, Djerf Avenue robes or Dior lip oil, girls were sat in front of their cameras, ring light in place, to show me what they picked up today. I was trapped on a digital merry-go-round of overconsumption.
10. lit girl life
:as you can tell from the title, my tastes resonate with the so-called thought daughter. the majority of the books i read are on the capital-L-Literature end of the spectrum. yes, The Secret History is one of my favorite books. yes, i love Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, Sylvia Plath, and Lana del Rey. i do, in fact, own a New Yorker tote bag. i arrange my books in a pleasing way, snap a photo, and post it to instagram. i don’t gravitate towards most contemporary romance and thrillers. i don’t think it’s a bad thing to like those books, and i don’t think it’s a bad thing to be a ~literary snob~. people like what they like, and there’s a reason certain books are categorized as Literature: they’re good!
i bring a book with me everywhere i go. i have read The Bell Jar on a bus, and made friends with a girl sitting next to me who had the same copy in her bag. that is what i believe it comes down to: human connection. i bring my book with me when i go out, i post my books on instagram, to find connection with others who resonate with my interests. to find some kind of community. while the thought daughter is a common trope online, it’s honestly not all that common to find one out in the wild. (maybe if you live in NYC or London. in Texas, where i am, it is not.)
conclusion: thoughts on shame
ever since i read a post by
touching on the subject — “you’re not demure, you’re a mess” — i’ve been thinking about this concept of false shame. i’ve defined it in previous posts but here is the definition as valerie cites it:I’m very much perplexed about it all, ashamed even. My first instinct is to punish myself for misbehaving, back to the recluse state we go, what are you doing. Haunted and bombarded from all sides by the three M’s of womanhood—modesty, maturity, mindfulness—the thought of digressing or deviating in any way is terrifying. Sandra Lee Bartky explored the concept of false shame in Femininity and Domination (chapter "Shame and Gender"): “False shame is felt when a person evaluates her behavior in line with commitments which are not really her own, commitments which disturb a moral equilibrium to which she will shortly return.” Indeed—in my mind, with every year added to a woman’s lifespan come new responsibilities, drowning out the partying, the lipstick stains, the promiscuity, the wilderness of it all, one day at a time, taking everything away until there’s only chronic fatigue and a full counter of anti-aging serums. The days she’s going to reminisce on decades from now can only be lived once.
false shame: in the context of this post, i see false shame as the force which sees any signs of girly expression and obliterates, obliterates, obliterates. the worst: this force works not only from the outside but from the inside; the hatred for girls is planted into us, at least it was into me! not in the sense that i hated girls but in the sense that i hated my own girlyness: false shame taught me to hate myself, to self-obliterate.
and i am done with self-obliteration.
:Shame is a marvelous tool of the patriarchy, it teaches us to do the gritty work ourselves. Shame is a self-fulfilling destruction machine. It keeps us quiet, meek, passive, and exploitable. Girls and women are especially indoctrinated into a culture of shame. Often, even before exiting the womb, their impending presence in the world will be spoken of with a tint of prescribed inherent shame meant just for us. Less worthy of autonomy even in utero.
We teach our girls to be ashamed not just of their behaviors, but of the very things that are the most innate to their humaness; their hair and skin and sweat and blood. We are made to be ashamed of the cyclical, nonlinear patterns of our bodies. Remember to hide the pad up your sleeve while walking to the bathroom, so no one knows you’re functioning as intended. Remember also that first and foremost, you exist for a reason, and that reason exists outside of yourself. Your purpose exists in giving yourself to others.
….
A healing woman, who is liberated in herself, who is sovereign over her body, is noncongruent with a culture reliant on shame. So the culture pushes back, working as it has been designed, to quell those who dare to test the bounds and unlearn the predicated ways of what womanhood “should” be. The shame machine continues to train our girls into the complicity of their own demise.
Sitting from a safe distance I can gaze back on my past and see it so clearly, the kind of clarity that only time can provide. I see the ways in which I was set up by social conditioning to fail, how I was failed by those I trusted, and the ways I failed myself. I see the thread of shame that ran through every traumatic event that has made me who I am. Shame depends on secrecy to survive; to speak on it voids it of its power. And I’m speaking now.
reading
this morning helped me think about capital but i was unfortunately not able to find the exact quote (still want to credit her 💖)
ugh! i meant to end with THIS quote from shelby as well:
added in! sorry it was missing from the emails
"A healing woman, who is liberated in herself, who is sovereign over her body, is noncongruent with a culture reliant on shame. So the culture pushes back, working as it has been designed, to quell those who dare to test the bounds and unlearn the predicated ways of what womanhood “should” be. The shame machine continues to train our girls into the complicity of their own demise.
Sitting from a safe distance I can gaze back on my past and see it so clearly, the kind of clarity that only time can provide. I see the ways in which I was set up by social conditioning to fail, how I was failed by those I trusted, and the ways I failed myself. I see the thread of shame that ran through every traumatic event that has made me who I am. Shame depends on secrecy to survive; to speak on it voids it of its power. And I’m speaking now."
thank you so so so much for mentioning my writing, it genuinely means so much! i'm glad it can mean something to you, and can give you something to think about.