The Life of a Girl

The feeling of inadequacy is a constant weight that rests upon the chests of girls growing up. Our lives are different from those of the other gender and everything in between. The social connotations and requirements that are put in place in order to make the female society conform to one just image. Effects from the media are never ending; cognitively damaging pieces of art sculpted by the tools of photoshop and face tune, sculpted by the diets of squirrels and health enhancing powders, are easily accessible with just a swipe of a thumb. Women with ribs that look like jail cell bars display their microscopic bodies for the world to see. The “Ideal Girl”, a completely fabricated phenomenon that manipulates the minds of innocent young girls.

Ignoring the media for a moment, take a look at society, the boys of our age who thrive in the world are the exact opposite of what we as girls are supposed to be. They are egotistical, fitness obsessed and are always looking for a lock to put their key in. A boy who fits this description once said “a key that fits into many locks is a good key, but a lock that opens to multiple keys is a bad lock”. An idea that has always perplexed me, how is it okay for men and boys to strut around the world looking for action and get praise when they succeed, when if a girl does the same thing she is a “whore”, “desperate” or “easy”. Let me describe it too you:

A boy and a girl go to the same party. They drink, dance, flirt a little bit and all around have a good time. One thing leads to the other and the boy and the girl find themselves in the upstairs bathroom “making the night”. Emerging from their sanctuary, the boy’s friends see him and offer high fives, slaps on the back and even hugs for his “good work”. Nothing is said to the girl except for whispers about who she “is” now for the next few days at school.

They both did the same thing, they both hopefully enjoyed it as much as the other but, for some reason one gets praised and the other not so much.

This is not the case for every girl, some of us, myself, have gotten to the point in our lives where we don't take the bullshit that is so kindly offered to us on a silver platter. We stand our ground and hold what is important to us, clutching onto it with white knuckles.

Too much has happened in my life for me to put so much value on the normal problems of life that everyday high school girls face. Living in an unhappy household with a father who said he “valued” his children but proceeded to abuse them in unconscious ways makes for placing stress on “girl problems” to feel like a joke. To go through back to back eating disorders, from the glamour of bulimia, to the icy diamond ring of anorexia, to ticking clock of obsession. The second hand never stops, it spins and spins until we are too nauseous to keep staring. To forget the events of 5 months of your live because of living in shock and depression. To get left on the side of a street crying into the warm tea in your hands keeping you alive. Puts into perspective the irrelevance of pitiful problems of “girls”. The funny thing is that these problems feel like the weight of the world because they are “such a big deal” in our eyes.

We as girls are uniting through campaigns, workshops, protests, Instagram accounts and Facebook groups. But it is not enough, until we can install the confidence in every girl to ignore the evil of society. The wave of shame that splashes over the rocks that lay on the beach of our bodies. Until the water stills and raindrops are the only sound of water splashing and not wasted tears, we wait. Patiently. Cause thats what we are taught. Everything will be okay in time, right? If nothing is changing thats a hell of a lot of time to wait.

I know that this piece is over exaggerated and focuses on a lot of the bad on the world. I know that it is important to acknowledge the good. It is better for the conscious mind but in reality, it isn’t atypical for us as girls to focus on the bad and obsess. I make all of these exaggerations because I know from experience what obsessions can do to a person. How they can make you feel alone even in a room full of your closest friends. That’s how our brains work, we focus on the things in life that we want to change because we have learnt that the only things in life that deliver immediate satisfaction are the things that we change. But the gruelling task of changing our lives becomes our obsessions. And the outside influences of society have a correlation to the desire within us to change.