Educate Yourself.

008: i’m not who i think i am

1.

“People are meant to judge the facts and evidence surrounding a circumstance, never meant to judge other people.”

Reading that very own sentence in one of my textbooks changed my life.

When I was a teenager, I wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine. I wasn’t exactly doing things I’m very proud of, and I was absolutely engaging in behavior that I don’t recognize as something I’d do now. I believe most of us had that experience.

For some years after being sixteen, I’d avoid going out. I’d avoid showing my face on pictures, I rarely posted myself on Instagram. It all seemed like I’d committed an unforgivable crime, when the crime was, in fact, being a sixteen year old girl immersed in so many different worlds, and being exposed to so many different orientations on how to, well, live your life, which I now find absurd.

As the first Lisbon sister to go said on ‘The Virgin Suicides’ (1999): “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl”.

I’m not here to talk to you about being sixteen and being sad, that is done a lot on this website and I’m sure you can find much more interesting material on that, I just wanted you to know that I was just trying to find myself on that age and failed miserably for many factors. But now, I see that you will never (or if you do, maybe it will take you your whole life) actively know who you are completely.

I say that I failed because there always were many handbooks on how to behave as a woman, how to act, how to be, how to speak, and I’m writing this to you because not only did it get worse with clean girl era, soft girl era, dark feminine (YOU ARE BEING PUT IN A BOX AS A WOMAN!!!!!!!), but it WILL get even more precarious, given the political context we’re inserted in. Also, if you think you’re “just a girl” and not really made for politics, know that the power belongs to the people. A society only follows norms that they think are useful to them, useful to their social order, and if a new pattern of society is being formed, and if that pattern of people is not only contrary to giving rights to minorities, but HATES women, you will be affected. You will have no rights whatsoever. You will be, as you say yourself, “just a girl”. That is unacceptable.

My mother raised me to think of myself as an individual inserted in a democracy. Everyone has equal rights. That is beautiful, and that is a myth.

I was then boxed as a girl. The process of finding myself as an individual was very much delayed after that because, as I’ve said, the handbooks on “how to” shaped me. Phrases like “you said that very loudly”, “boys don’t like when girls show they’re smarter” also shaped me and I could go on forever.

Going into college and seeing people from high school made me nervous and self conscious. But am I uncomfortable for myself or am I uncomfortable because of societal norms that prioritize men, are unwritten, and that are ,obviously, anti women?