'girlhood' felt like an exclusive members club

it doesn't any more

The illusion of a universal ‘girlhood’ experience, mentioned so often in these viral Substack essays and memoirs, broke off in parts.

When it happened the first time, I didn’t have the words to explain it. I was stuck in the feeling, hoping it would peel off me before we reached the Pathè cinema. I didn’t care if it disappeared through the crack of the window or slowly pooled at the bottom of my feet, I just needed the fear out of my head. It all must have been top of mind for her because mid-conversation, she turned to me and said, “If it was a hundred years ago, we couldn’t have been best friends you would have had to be my slave, I think”. I was nine years old. Whilst I was just happy to have a friend, taking comfort in this shared experience and probably already looking forward to having the memories, she thought of all the ways we were different. I had been living in ignorant bliss, naive to the fractures splintering in our experiences both in the past and the future. Because to me, we were just girls, one and the same. We had fun for the rest of the day.

This isn’t going to be one of those stories in which I detail how I grew unsavoury feelings towards other people / girls because of my lived experiences. The relationships with the women in my life are the only thing keeping me afloat. This is a homing beacon for everyone accustomed to the weight of lethargy caused by years of looking forward in hopes that something will change. I offer it as a reminder that we’ve all been here.

As we dabble in our twenties, I hear the panic about what the advent of this new decade means for us. For some, 'us' means very little; for others, it means a great deal. A friend explains how she refrains from saying she’s twenty out loud. Being twenty means she can buy a house, marry, and do all the typical adult things. I respond with, “I feel like I’m 30.” They always laugh when I say this. They think it’s because I’ve had a stressful week or haven’t slept my prescribed nine hours a night. But really, it’s simpler than that. Maybe what I should have said is, “I’ve been mourning the loss of my childhood for so long that I’ve become accustomed to its absence, so the dawn of a new year simply means another 365 days spent in emotional limbo, keeping the resentment at bay.”

Resentment is easier to accrue than you realise. Among shame and inferiority, it’s an emotion we find ourselves incapable of claiming. It becomes harder to appreciate the good things despite the struggles because I was born lucky. I love my family, I love my friends, and any trauma I’ve endured is the result of another person’s madness. I was young and it was outside of my control. Resentment, my prickly friend, turns the impersonal personal. It forces you to look at others' lives as a blank slate and yours, marred with pitted scars and broken paths.

The second time it happened, I was thirteen. I’d found from an early age that the introduction of male attention can put more than a strain on the communion between girls. If you’ve read some of my previous work, you’d know that during this time, I was the only black girl in my year. By now, we know about the racial disparities in puberty, especially among girls, so as you can imagine, school became my own personal hell. To this day, I downplay my experiences there, trying to suppress the truth, only for the fear to arise in waves to drag me down. When I needed support and community the most, I was subject to ridicule, and it was made abundantly clear to me, by those in school and outside of it, that it was directly because of how I looked. Fun fact: it took me five years to explain to my mother why I would shut down at the mention of that place, and even then, I couldn’t say half of it. Two more to remember why I had strange older men blocked on Instagram. So very quickly, everything you associate with ‘girlhood’—the games, the hobbies, the freedom/naivety, peace of mind, and ease of life—ceased to exist for me. I had been aged and forced to deal with the dark sides of life while others frolicked in the sun.

I try not to draw connections and conclusions where there are none, so I worked hard to externalise these experiences. As with all endeavours, there are successes and failures. Everything that happened fuelled this violent curiosity. I could not survive without knowing why the world worked the way it did. If I could figure out why I was being treated this way, why I had been introduced to the -isms of the world before my time, maybe I could do something about it. So I worked day and night to become a master in all things racism, sexism, intersectionality, and misogyny. I began to see the cracks in the lives everyone else led and it became harder to retain joy because everything seemed interlinked in a horrible and all-consuming way. I could finally understand why they say ignorance is bliss.

I have to hold my tongue sometimes because what is normal to me is considered “too deep” for others, and I don’t want to be made aware of how isolated I am in my understanding. My family jokes that I must always explain “why,” but sometimes I see them growing frustrated, so I retreat. I watch them blow things off so casually and wonder if I’m irrevocably cursed to see the worst. They remind me that they didn’t grow up the way I did, so they're not as ‘sensitive,’ and I feel myself shrink inside because they don’t know the half of it and I would rather not ruin the facade even more.

I found solace as I grew older. Until then, I had been a victim of circumstance. I moved to a space with other girls like me and became less and less isolated. There was one night in particular when we all lay on the couches in the dark and started sharing all our wayward experiences. Each one was met with a collective laugh because only we could recognise how degrading they were, and yet each was bizarre in its own right, so sadness and regret turned into comedy. It was with them that I learned my experience was not as singular as I thought, and I am beyond thankful for the reminder. In each of them, I found home and recognition. We shared the same quirks and little tales. I could laugh as loud as I wanted or say what I thought. Not only did they indulge my lengthy observations, but they also encouraged them and had plenty of their own. I can tell them almost anything, and if you want to see me at my most authentic, get one of them on the phone. Unbeknownst to them, they built me back up year by year, and I could finally live in the present again. Finding ‘girlhood’ after many had left it behind saved me.

It would be dishonest to say I harbour no resentment towards the universe for the chronology of my life, but these days I can barely feel it twinge. It flares up now and then when someone flippantly says they wonder what it would have been like to experience something life-altering or traumatic in their lives. But the more I realise that I do not have to accept all the lessons life tried to teach me, the more liberated I feel. I no longer need to look for a reason in every action or attribute each thought to a prior event. I am who I am now, and for the most part, I am content. I’ve been calling myself nostalgia’s eternal prisoner, but maybe it’s time to release myself from that narrative. I see no need to separate my life into chapters so I may yearn after one and resent the other. It only serves as a means of comparison between others, what got us here in the first place. So yes, ‘girlhood’ felt like an exclusive members club I didn’t have access to, but it doesn’t anymore because I refuse to place constraints and limits on when and where I’m meant to feel all the associated benefits.

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Hope you guys enjoyed this week’s essay !! Decided to do a more personal one this time around

Don’t forget I have started the Dear X series where you can email in your writing prompts / queries and I'll write a letter to you in response. (all anonymous of course). Think of it as a literary agony aunt. If you want to participate email me using onyiverse@substack.com