Girlhood

tw: brief mention of suicide

Initially, I did not have the words to communicate the disconnect I felt from my gender. Instead, I tucked my hair into hats and stole my brother’s clothes, expressed my dislike for pink and fashion and boys, and refused to ever lose a competition.

I tried, without words, to say what I didn’t know so many other girls were thinking while the monkey bars chapped their palms: No, I’m not a girl. I’m a person. 

It later turned out that I had falsely dichotomized my ability to smile while wearing a skirt with having, like, actual thoughts and feelings. Once I realized I could do both at once, I did them often. I made my peace with pink, though I much preferred green. The problem was on the TV, in books, in everyone else’s mind—not in real life. I’m a person, I’m a girl.

Boyhood gets to be so many things–so does manhood. It’s being really good at sports and being a mysterious academic who reads philosophy in coffee shops, and it’s being a wannabe rockstar in eyeliner and skirts and an unconventionally charming comic book fan. It’s not needing to ask permission before you make mistakes. Boys will be boys.

Girlhood is none of those things. It’s the space left behind. Girlhood meant I could not play outside after Thanksgiving dinner because I was old enough to hold a towel and dry dishes. It meant learning how to hide a tampon in my sleeve on my way to the bathroom. It meant lots of fun things too, like movie nights and playing mermaids in the pool. I think I knew I was missing out on something, though. There’s something inherently missing from girlhood because boyhood possesses it, withholds it. It’s a zero-sum game and girls always lose.

When I was very young, my favorite game was one where I located a large rock, hauled it to the top of a tree, then let it drop to the ground and shatter. I can’t help but be jealous of how my brother gets to continue having chaotic fun and isn’t asked to grow up as fast as I was. Of course, he’s a kid. But so was I.

Either partake in girlhood or be nothing. I chose nothing, but I wanted to be a boy so bad. It wasn’t—isn’t—an internal problem with my gender identity, but one I experience externally. I want the freedom. There’s nothing like that for girls. 

I am a girl and I am a person, and not as observed as a silhouette but as an internal world. Still, I envy boyhood. My understanding of gender as arbitrary, yet oppressive, cannot grant me a ticket to being understood as more than a hollow creature, a genre of human. 

It can’t accommodate a lot of people. Many of us lose our childhood, whether it is to girlhood, to poverty, queerness, brownness, illness. Maybe the world doesn’t owe us what boyhood precludes. But why is it always us who must make the sacrifices?

I’m not uncomfortable with being a woman. I’m uncomfortable with what others impose upon me when they understand me to be a woman. I’m nostalgic for memories I never got to make because I was born with a predisposition to victimhood, because I had to consider the impact they would have on others. To the latter, I know a lot of women feel this way; it’s evidenced perhaps most disturbingly by the fact that although women attempt to take their own lives more often than men, they are more likely to fail because they try to do it quietly. 

It feels like we lose generation after generation to new patriarchal manifestations of loneliness. The idea (which is now more of a meme) of being “not like other girls,” came from the reality that an overwhelming volume of girls determined that they must be the only ones who felt the way they did—who felt anything real at all. 

I don’t even really wish for boyhood, I just wish I had been allowed to be more than one thing, been allowed to make dumb mistakes, and do some things without being watched, even when I’m alone. I’m still lonely, still watching memories I cannot make unfold in male spaces around me.

I want to demand that for myself. Does that require reinvention? I’m sick of the choice between being reduced to a series of symbols that constitute the performance of womanhood and trying in vain to disguise my way into boyhood. 

I wish that I could be a girl and be a person all at once in more places than just in my head.