welcome to girlhood

I sit down to write this first post, and I feel a bit like I’m rushing in from the cold with a brutal wind and pudgy raindrops at my heels. The threat of turning 30 in exactly six months offers a similar sensation. I feel like I am escaping something, but also as though safety is just before me. 

Let me rewind.

second grade

I had an excellent childhood. I’ll paint it for you: Aaron Carter’s Oh Aaron skips in the boombox. The ball of your foot burns from riding the brake on your Razor scooter down the driveway while wearing Old Navy flip flops. Your hair is in butterfly clips. The plaid of your pink bermuda shorts is now green with grass stains collected all summer. You ride your bike in circles around all of the cul-de-sacs in your neighborhood, and you race home when you hear the harmonics of the mosquito spray truck or the trill of the peepers near the river (whichever happens to come first). You tear through the Magic Tree House books, and you believe your neighbor’s Little Tikes playset can get you to outer space or the Wild West. You go to your piano lessons, your guitar lessons, your ballet classes, your soccer practices, your basketball practices, your summer camp. You have a very best friend in the whole world, and you buy matching headbands at Limited Too to prove it.

Everything is good, and it will be for always.

Of course, that’s not how it stays. Your brain gets bigger and lets in more of the world, and suddenly there’s more surface area for life’s less savory scenes to unfold. There’s so much self-doubt. You’ve probably heard America Ferrera’s monologue in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, so I don’t need to explain what it’s like to be socialized as a young woman in the United States.

left: age two / right: age 24 (taken by my best friend, Brisaela)

So, when I say I’m on the cusp of feeling safe, I mean to say I’m safe from myself, from internalized misogyny, from the sense of competition my socialization imposed upon me as a young woman, from the idea that physical beauty is essential in determining my worth. I’m safe from believing my experience is singular, and I’m safe from believing in the loneliness that is inherent to that singularity. I am releasing the idea that I have to be exceptional to be valued. I am revisiting and extending my girlhood on my own terms, with my fully formed prefrontal cortex and a better discernment for what is and is not me. 

I don’t have to be exceptional to be valued.

What you can expect:

Essays ✎ —well, essays lite. These are topics that have been weighing on me. It’s basically my journal but contextualized so I feel like less of a dweeb.

Curations ♪ —these are suggested sensory experiences (what is this, Portlandia?) No, just combinations of what to listen to at what time of day in which location with which book in hand, etc. A mood board, but more.

Notes ❑ —a feature of the chaotic landscape that is my Notes app

Conversations ☺️ —discussions and interviews about anything!

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Thanks for reading!