Growing Up Female - Blog Posts

I'm 19 and I stand in my room. Have you accomplished anything if you spent the year running just to end up back in the room that saw all your tears? Isn't the point of running to slow down somewhere else? But then I hear my mom chuckling at a joke I sent her through the door and remember that she didn't do that. Then

I am 18 and I am standing in my room. Sometimes I have to remind myself of how i carried so much stress in my neck then. I sat perched on my bed like a stranger too polite to mention the unusual offered seat. I had slammed a door behind me confident the next one was already open. The dread when the knob doesn't turn. I escaped through a window just to end up on this carpet again.

I am 19. I carry less stress in my neck. I devide friends into neat piles; healing and burning. Like an acid drip working unstoppably through your jeans. It doesn't actually hurt yet but god chemistry was your best subject. I see the acid on her jeans but we're adults now. Adults don't grip each others' arms until the circulation cuts off to keep from the cliff. I can make you a tea.

I make tea. I've always made tea. Perhaps that's the beauty of 19. The only novel thing in this poem, the oldest of all things. It's called an adventure at 8, a hobby at 15, a habit at 19. Hello. Would you like a tea. I was making one anyway. Really, I'm quite good at pouring it now.

sometimes you are 19 standing in the kitchen wondering how you forgot to have breakfast and lunch today, how you will exit the teenage in 47 fridays, how you used to love watermelons 4 summers ago and now you can't even stand the sight of it, how there were floors that saw you wipe them clean off your own tears once, how you changed your favourite coffee recipe last summer because your bestfriend liked it and you guys haven't talked since then, how the new book you're reading was never really your type but you love it, how you hated your hair for 9 winters, how the windows of your new house are bigger, how you feel bad for hurting them, how maybe making mistakes is okay, how maybe you don't have to not eat that cupcake when you go out today, how the wind feels too right whenever you snuggle into your bed, how you were 17 and all the winter ache wanted you to open your kitchen drawers and look for warmth. how then you didn't know someday you'll be 19 standing in the kitchen wondering if you forgot to put sugar in your coffee again.

I'll tell you a secret: I felt like I was better. It couldn't happen to me. I was worldly and supported and had a plan and I spoke well and in 2 languages. The world was waiting to unlock itself to my potential. Back then, I had the secret fear that the world was too small for me.

And it happened anyway. The terrible cliché I felt too good for. I got stuck in the home town. Plans didn't work, and suddenly almost a year had passed and I'd spent it in an internship that was my plan H in a place that was my plan Never. And now, with bloody fingernails, I've held on to the easiest dream I had. Not even the pretty, big ones that I thought I'd conquer for fun and joy. The easy one. And I'm sick. Two years at a minimum, first time I've been sick like this. I can do nothing.

Time is running out and university is drawing closer and I was sixteen in a school I hated and I PROMISED myself I wouldn't let it come to this. I wouldn't cave. I'd take the time I want and I'd see the world and I thought I was so prepared. I thought the world was waiting for me. I thought I was so privileged. I thought that meant everything would be butterflies.

Why can't it be butterflies.

I have a beautiful friend

I have a beautiful friend. Half a year younger than me, with almond eyes and skin maybe two to three shades darker than caramel. Dusty sunset. It reminds me of spices and the billowing fumes of a barista coffee machine.

She has Columbian heritage, with glossy, thick black hair and long eye lashes. Dark eyes, bright teeth. She laughs big, smiles wide. The slight figure of a doe. She gets excited about everything. She's naive. She's adorable. She wants to explore.

She's beautiful, everyone tells her. She's terrified.

My friend sees the eyes. Of course she does. They're not admiring. They're predatory. She wears who she is on her sleeve, and she's a wondering, easily amazed person. She wants to be happy. Oh, have you ever heard of a better rape victim.

She wants to kiss someone. She wants to be in a relationship, with cuddles and pinky finger promises. She wants to be desired.

We smile. We watch her drink. We make sure she gets home afterwards.

Beauty is a lot of things. But I'd wager to say that no matter if you've carefully cultivated it yourself, were born into it, want it, use it, hate it, are aware of it

Broken down, all social veneers and descriptors stripped away,

It attracts attention.

Oh, Silvia Plath was right.

Fuck them. Fuck them for laughing. Fuck them for being so mindless. It hurts even worse knowing laughing at pain wasn't a conscious decision. It came so naturally to them.

Fuck them for having the power to hurt me without even thinking about it.

//—i thought about adding what situation exactly I mean but does it even matter

A young student's selfie

Early summer, just before our last summer holidays, we got into a discussion with a teacher at recess.

He had a topic for us. Evidence. An opinion.

One more year and we'd be done with school. We felt so mature.

His discussion? Why, young girls and body images of course.

Oh, we were so in. He started on the young girls in his class, how they dressed. How they walked. How social media was trapping them. We nodded along, thinking we were talking about the same thing.

We thought we were talking about Instagram's clutch on our young sisters. The twelve year olds with eating disorders. The sleekly styled hair of middle schoolers with baby fat and round eyes.

He pulled out a photo.

A girl. We'd seen her. It was a good pic, her at eye level with a statue in a museum they'd gone to. A class trip. She'd asked this teacher to make the picture of her, all golden curls and brown lashes.

Look at what I had to photograph, he said. Showing us the lace bra peeking through her shirt, the pose she stroke like she was twenty-five.

We said all the right things. How horrifying it was. That society shouldn't do this to girls. Satisfied, he left, pocketing his phone.

That was two months ago.

Someone realised it yesterday. That class trip to the museum was four months ago.

He had kept the picture of her on his camera roll.

Lace bra and baby round eyes.

Do you know what I hate? What I'm really, really angry at?

We're not allowed to express love.

And it pisses me off.

Yes! That boy in my class looks stunning in that green sweater! I gaze in awe at the way my friend looks like an urban goddess at midnight drenched in street lights, surrounded by dancing teenagers at a party in the theatre parking lot! Another one looks like dawn and summer fields fell in love with her! I adore the way my classmate dresses like a punk fairy, with dirty blonde braids reaching to her hips and grazing her red leather jacket! The boy who lends me his eraser has the most fantastic sense of humour, the way he looks down for a second before he grins!

I love herb gardens! And perfume oils! Old books and fantasy novels! Dope-ass boots paired with a nice coat and conservative scarf clashing with my pink hair! I love poems! And jasmine tea!

I love how the old Vietnamese lady runs the best soup bar in town. How excited my seat neighbour gets over fancy notebooks. I love it when a fellow teenage girl hesitantly smiles back at me across the street.

Why is she hesitant? Because there's that ever-lasting question. Is this the socially designated response? Am I supposed to react differently? Am I supposed to react at all? Wouldn't it be "cooler" to ignore me?

Is it weird when I tell a boy I hardly know that he looks epic in that sweater? Is it over the top when I tell that girl in my French class how cute her boots are every time she wears them? Is waving at people I barely know but I get a happy vibe from bad?

Is it wasteful and expensive that I love perfume and essential oils? Is me wearing my mother's expensive coat with leather boots and purple hair childish? Is my idealism and wide-eyed hope to be laughed at?

We're not allowed to express love.

I had so much of it.

Soft and Safe

I have a friend, let's call her Soft and Safe.

Let's call her that because it's shorter than Fluttering butterflies and excited hands waving, lilac purple capris and silk blouse, also soft ripped jeans and oversize hoodie. It's shorter than the Life of the party, social butterfly, but also sleepover deep talk.

She was the first one to fully support me when I came out as bi. She's still the one I feel most comfortable telling my insecurities to.

She's physically beautiful, yes, with brown curls and doe eyes, but more like her soul would make any body beautiful, you get it? It really doesn't matter how she looks. Does that make sense?

I know Soft and Safe doesn't see herself this way, so this is my way of telling her. A Tumblr post she'll never see.

Because all Soft and Safe sees is her flat chest and her acne prone skin. All she sees is that she was asked to the ball last in dance class last year. She was recently told she has depression, and she said "yeah, checks out." I don't think she sees how much I admire her, and want her to stay in my life forever. But I never told her.

So, how can you be sure you're not someone's Soft and Safe?

A war I didn't sign up for.

We're teenage girls, me and my friends. In every sense of the word.

We've got one who loves k-dramas, Tom Holland and makes great almond cake, we've got a tiny one who's sarcasm mutes me every time (to her great delight) and loves anime, we've got one who's the light and laughter of any party, who's soft safety and recently was diagnosed with depression, and we've got a childish and dreaming one who's beautiful, stunning. Everyone tells her. It frightens her.

I haven't seen my friends in a while.

No one's fault, just life. School, tests, a pandemic. So imagine my happiness! Our excitement! When a friend's friend invited us to a party, and we found time to meet up beforehand, to talk! Laugh! Eat pizza!

My friends came. And we laughed. I told them I've never been to a party, that I was pretty nervous. Soft And Safe grinned at me, told me it was fine, the boys that invited us were nice. And guess what? She had kissed one of them!! A drunken make-out, wasn't that cool??!

Then she stopped. Her smile slipped a little

Well, not that cool. She started, sitting there beside my bed.

Not all of it.

And sentence for sentence, Soft And Safe, who I grew up with, who I'd known like the other girls since I was ten, new in town and was adopted into their little group, hesitantly told me a story I'll never forget. Because it taught me life.

Because the boy she made out with was nice.

Until he asked her to kiss him on the cheek for a picture and she felt too uncomfortable and drunk to say no.

Until, when they were kissing alone in a room, he kept trying to put his hand under her shirt, even when she pushed it away.

Until he pulled her onto his lap, crotch pushed uncomfortably against her jeans, and held her waist down.

Until he barked at the girl checking up on Soft And Safe to get out.

Until he put his hand into her pants, and answered "everything is fine, relax", when she told him she didn't like that.

Until he pushed her over the sink.

Until, when she said she didn't want that and that they should go back downstairs, he got back claps and fist bumps from the other boys.

She got her best friend, whom she had rejected a week earlier, call her a slut. He said he could never see her the same way again.

We thought it wouldn't happen to us. But as we sat there in my room, staring at her forced smile, eyes frantic, we realised how she had done everything right.

And it had still happened.

It had happened to me three weeks earlier, at my gym.

And we realised

It wouldn't stop. We wouldn't grow out of it.

Being a woman would be a war we hadn't signed up for.

We went to the party. I saw him. I didn't deck him like I had planned. Because everyone would think I'm the one out of line.