Today I woke up early to make my mom’s breakfast and lunch and decided, after a nice hot cup of green tea mixed with honey, that I would be a productive member of society. I decided I would clean my room and fix up my desk and finally finish my ATC (artist trading card). Well, all that went out of the window when I found this.
Yes, I have a secret false book and yes that's a floppy disk from the early 2000s, but don’t get too excited. My mom bought the 'book' for me so at any time she could rummage through it and find the EXTREMELY EMBARRASSING collection of letters, rants, random thoughts and ripped out journal entries that lay within its beautiful wooden exterior.
Most of the things I found were from middle school to high school and oh my lord I cannot believe the person that lay within these pages. Don’t believe me? I took the liberty of pulling some choice quotes from a six page Omegle chat log I decided was important enough to print and add into this collection of papers.
Stranger: hahaha ur so cute
Me: Thank you
Stranger: yeah
Me: i think ur just saying that cuz im young
Stranger: no mayn
Stranger: i don't give a fuck
Stranger: u sound cute so i said so
Stranger: im not hitting on you
---
Me: if you were hitting on me that would be awkward
Stranger: yeah
Stranger: that's why i din't get naught with you
Me: i would have left if you did
Stranger: hahahhahah got it mayn
Stranger: ut a decent and beauti ful gal
---
Stranger: don't ever fuck ur rep by sleeping with random guys
Me: i dont plan to
Stranger: yea
Stranger: i know
Stranger: but baby sometimes it happens
Me: not to me im very goal oriented
Stranger: ppl gete horny n end up with nasty things
End of conversation
(Note by me)
My internet disconnected...
---
Disgusted yet? Because I sure as fuck am. Who is this sad, obviously self-conscious girl? Who the hell is that? I mean for one, the guy is a prick, plain and simple. Two, I obviously have no confidence in myself whatsoever, and three, the slut shaming that I am complicit in is just horrible. And what’s scary is that not much has changed. I’ve still never been on a date, never kissed another person (romantically), had sex, or smoked weed and this is three years later. Although, I have a feeling that I wasn’t actually 18 when I had this conversation because I had the bad habit of claiming that I was older than I was so men would talk to me.
Pathetic right? Well, that’s what I thought when I first read it. I wished that I could travel back in time and slap some sense into that girl typing to this predator. But, then I realized I was bred by society and ate its propaganda up like it was a delicious loaf of freshly baked bread. I was supposed to be modest, to lie about my age, my weight, to distance myself from girls who were “less pure” than me, to feel more superior than those girls, and most importantly, I was supposed to be flattered that a man, no matter his age, found me attractive.
GOD DAMN DID I SIP THE KOOLAID OR WHAT? I mean, I was a cookie cutter cut out of the perfect teenage girl, the little angel with a superiority complex, and where did that get me. At 15, I hated my body. At 16, I went on a strict diet, eating less than 1200 calories while working out for an hour and a half every day at after school tennis practice. At 17, I calculated the exact day it would take me to lose 50 pounds and finally be the size that I wanted. I translated that date into roman numerals and wrote it out in beautiful script so that when that day came I could have it permanently tattooed on my body. I would wear it as a badge of honor and when people inevitably asked me “how I did it,” I would shrug and lie through my teeth, “It just came off. I didn’t do anything.” Because ‘real women’ didn’t have to diet to have good bodies, they were born with them. By 18, I hated taking pictures of myself, hated looking at myself in the mirror, hated everything about the way I looked. I told myself no boy would want to date me because I didn’t look right, and ignored the strong feelings I had for the girl I could hardly keep my eyes off of in my Algebra 2 class, and then later in my Statistics class. The girl who called me funny and beautiful and made me feel like I could never catch my breath.
That’s who baby Extraterrestrial Cyborg was. She didn’t fit in. She was fat and brown and hairy and strong-willed and young and confused about her sexuality and perfect. She stood out in a way she wouldn’t appreciate until much later. She made people uncomfortable, forced them outside of their narrow-minded idea of who a teenage cis girl is supposed to be. I appreciate her so much for that. If she didn’t go through that awful, self-hatred, I would never be the woman I am today. Don’t get me wrong, I still carry a lot of baggage from my younger days, in truth it’s hard not too because the propaganda never ends. I still struggle with the idea that I need to perform for cis men, that I need to carry myself in a way that makes me seem desirable, that I need to hide certain aspects of my personality or outright lie about who I am, in order to garner their attention. While I think it’s getting easier, mostly due to my realization that I am not hetero by any means, it’s still something I am constantly having to deal with.
If you’re reading this and you’re feeling any of these thoughts, I really hope this speaks to you. I won’t patronize you by saying “it gets better” because I’m not in a position to make that statement. What I will say is you will change, adapt, and your past self will become a stranger to your present self. I think that’s the way we work. I hope your life is filled with enough struggles and hardships and pressure to turn you into the lovely gems you are destined to be. And when we get there, I hope we can all come together and say we made. We did it. This is us and we’re not going anywhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment