Feminine Sadness Is a Mindfield
Chelsea wrote a piece about girlhood and I’ve decided to write something particularly sinister as an offering. I’m sitting on my bed listening to some French song about love. Actually I have no idea what they’re saying I’m just assuming Thierry Müller’s creative project is what my unfulfilling coming of age movie’s lacking and the naked body on his album is some foreign deity sent to paint my life a thousand colors I’ve never known.
Maybe I’m overly imaginative, naive, arrogant to life, and too bruised by all the moments that never happened to me, but I’ve come to despise the broken realities of being a girl. All the nights spent replaying the same beautiful movies, letting an artificial world of cinematography be the undercurrent of experience to your quiet life.
At 14 you’ve figured it out. You’re going to be liked, desired, picked up in a nice shiny jeep and decorated in Jason, no, make it Jack’s lacrosse jacket. You’ll spend hours staring at yourself, plastering rose branded lipgloss, eyeshadow, and blush products all over that baby face they like, knowing they probably like you better without it; you look younger. Do you like how innocent they assume you are? People can tell you’re trying too hard, you’re not it, not their girl, not pretty enough, not advantageous enough, too childish. You’re visibly uncomfortable in the subjectivity of womanhood, a liar, they can tell by the awkwardness in your stance, keep trying. Jason’s not coming, he doesn’t even talk to you, and that makeup look you replicated from a YouTube tutorial made you uglier. Thankfully there’s still hope. You dream about how beautiful you’ll be at 16, how effortless it’ll all be. Of course beauty isn’t independent to you, it’s intertwined with attention from all the boys that’ll never begin to talk to you. You know nothing of real beauty or the world, only childish dreams of high school football games and the war within you of conformity.
By 15 you’re the girl skipping lunch scrolling through every app on her phone to pass the time that most people use to actually talk to each other. Girls only wanted to be around you in middle school when you could help them learn mundane regurgitations of predictable class material, so it’s fine you’re not with them now, right? It’s become clear girls award respect to the brand of girl who most directly satisfies the male fantasy. It’s too bad you’re not that yet, but you’re pure enough to remain undesirable, lost in your emptiness, neglecting the world of men. It’s apparent that you’re out of place. You never had the clean fresh-off-the braces smile or the confidence to go with it. They made you feel so despicably unappetizing.
Chances are, before you reach that cute idealized version of older girl you’ve dreamed of, depression will enter your life (she wasn’t ever coming). Last night you confided in a stranger online about what it’s like walking through the halls at school. “One day I looked around and I could feel it in my bones, the synchronized behavior of all the people, like I’m watching a school of fucking fish swarming in the bluest sea. And I’m alone, swimming in the cold, surrounded by darkness, watching.” Depression will never leave you, but at least now you’ve come to understand heavy metal. Watch as an unrecognizable yet familiar sublayer within you callouses your girl into one bad acid trip. Your life is stagnant hell.
You’re learning that being a sad girl is only tolerable if she’s admirable, palatable, and beautiful enough to be around. The media’s pumping out hot indie movies about love and all the actors are depressed and beautiful and seemingly make it work. It’s a script but it’s what life should be like. Is it stupid to want to see through the golden tint of Lady Bird, or blast The Smiths in a Pittsburgh tunnel? Maybe you’d be less empty if you had friends like Larry Clark’s, Kids. Sean Maguire would be an excellent therapist.
Attention looks like anonymous profiles online who interact with a hand-picked curation of you; you’re finally beautiful enough for the greater male population. A pleasable demon in disguise. Men will shower you with dumbed-down sexual propositions and then discard of you completely. You’ve never even been on a date. You’re still sad but they’ll pretend to care. They’re even attracted to your embrace of sadness, how disgusting your battle with life is now reduced to mere sexual appeal.
Girlhood never fully began, and it’s practically over, because your entire life’s worth was dictated by oppressive social structures and the deadly lies of youth. At 18 you’re lonelier than ever, describing yourself as something other than a girl, detached from traditional femininity because it never really offered its exclusive ease to begin with. Instead, you’re restless, staying up at night constructing delusional poetry about how your blood’s made of melted red roses and narcotics. A new hobby’s researching heroin because you’re obsessed with the parallels of dope, and you dream of riding down the Florida Keys on the back of black motorcycles. I’m the next fuckin’ femme fatale you’ll tell yourself as you light a cigarette. What ever happened to the little girl picking apart her Bambi reflection, praying to the only god she knew to be exactly like the hollow sex symbol you’ve become? Tough leather suits you. God’s on amphetamines. Jesus wants to fuck you.
Now when you cry your tears taste like heroin, and your eyes have the stillness of pieces of coal. You wonder if your tattooed dream man’s ever coming. He’s probably not, but all the Jasons in your sad little town suddenly want you. It’s too bad they’d never be seen with you except for sex. Rock and roll’s the only thing caressing you now. Watch another movie. Of course it’s about love. You’re scrolling through Tinder and Hinge now. Staring at comments from older men about your body. It’s like having coffee in the morning. Inside, you’re growing more violent by the day. You’re mourning a life for yourself you’ve never lived.
The death of the love you’ve never experienced. Hundreds of men infatuated with your young contorted persona and yet you remain so lonely it echoes through your room each night. Are you beautiful enough to be a sad girl yet? You know pain well, and they like it. You carry the roughness of men on the back of your broad shoulders and everyone can tell, in fact they’re enchanted with your hardness, but remember to stay thin. Everyone likes a fair skeletal girl who can be abused. Depression can produce a really good whore.
You’re in your own purgatory. Girlhood trapped you but you continue trying, constantly watching yourself lose, perpetually tormented by your relationship with men. A poisonous reminder that you won’t survive if you’re not pretty enough to be sad.
I’m making Chelsea a playlist on Spotify as I’m writing this. I made the cover photo two girls holding military grade artillery. Girls and guns just make sense now. This isn’t the life we chose, to be objects of unreachable beauty to validate our chaotic minds. Held on a pedestal of false beauty, furious with the world of polluted beauty. Growing up a girl is violent, and growing up a sad girl is its own religion.
You are nothing but an experience for the next man, letting hope keep you alive, continue being palatably unnerving. What happens when you don’t have youth’s lullabies to rock you to sleep? When the moments movies promised run dry and you’re left a shell of a girl kept alive by beautiful fantasies. What happens when drugs replace intimacy? What happens when beauty expires?
