STUDENT SAMPLE
How It Feels to be Girl Me
I AM GIRL but I offer nothing into letting that hold me back from being just that, girl. As the largest part of my identity, my gender, it is the most important and I will not excuse myself from loving everything that is feminine.
I do not remember the moment I became girl, yet I have felt its impact, and tried to turn my back on the implications of my gender my entire life. As kids, we don’t think about gender, we just are who we are, but I felt my gender, and then tied it to my worth when I was very small. “You’re such a pretty girl, isn’t she going to be beautiful when she grow up?” I was a kid, not someone trying to think about beauty and my value in anyone else’s eyes. But still, I grew up surrounded by love that came in the way of compliments that made me more and more aware of who I was physically before I ever questioned who I was emotionally.
Changes came in the beginning of my adolescence, just as every one of my peers changed as well. Now I not only felt as if I had to be beautiful, or girl, (two words synonymous in my mind at this time), but I also had everyone around me expecting me to be beautiful too. From movies to magazines, teenage girls are told how to look, perfect, and if they don’t look this way, then they are not valuable as girls. Something I had never questioned, that I was a girl, was being reduced to smooth legs and flashy teeth, two things I did not have as a kid, and this led me to question who I was if I was not perfect enough to call myself girl. During this conflict in myself, of not feeling worthwhile or beautiful enough my family said the opposite so many times the words ran together. “You are so beautiful-youaresobeautiful-youareonlyworthyifyourebeautiful-you are only worthy if you’re beautiful,” I must have heard wrong.Wrapped in self-doubt about being a girl, and losing who I knew I was, and only wanting to have beauty pulled me apart when I was young.
BUT I AM NOT TRAGICALLY GIRL for I have grown and turned self-doubt into self-love and girl into a synonym for fight. I have stopped listening to the calls of beauty, stopped reading about what I should look like and accepted myself. I mourn for 13 year old me who lost her childhood to praise for blonde hair, physical compliments, and flashes of blue from my own eyes. But these struggles and this pain I felt that came from the expectations for my own identity made me know who I am and I revel in the femininity that is inherently part of me. I celebrate the girl in me, the girl who finds beauty in others now before herself, and the girl whose strongest part of herself is just that, her. I now know I deserve comfort in my femininity because of how I struggled in myself to come to love what I am now, and what I’ve always been- girl.