An Ode to My Teenage Girlhood
it protected me until I could emerge: genderless and whole (1/3)
above: a photo I took in a dorm room in Interlochen, Michigan in 2012 (image description: two bruised knees and arms wrapped around them, the arms are covered in blue denim, no other features are visible)
I struggle with the language of gender as it pertains to the past. I see a photograph of my best friends and I at thirteen and I think, “Here is the power of female friendship.”
I look at a photo of myself with my best friends now and I think, “Look at these pals, these absolute queers.”
What if the femininity that I cocooned around myself at 16 was truly me? But then, what if the me that emerged, sloughing off the binary like sludge, unfurling my unshaven pits, my long dresses, they/them pronouns, is also me?
I have always valued the marks of aging, the healed scars, the teeth shifting somewhat closer to their natural state after braces, the tattoos that I’d never get now but will also never regret. They are a force, a reminder of the changing nature of it all, the heavy gallop of time which continues forward even as you swirl around language and pronouns and moments of genuine or vapid self-identification.
You want to ask: could that be me and also this?
Could something that was true then, that is false now, remain true?
above: a screenshot of a poem i wrote in my senior year of high school titled “The Tumblr Teen Girl Aesthetic”. (click here to read as text)
What is truth in the past?
The truth is that at the time, I was perfectly happy to play girl, to wear the facade of it like rubies, to exist in a world of ethereal femininity. And I was seeped with it, with the puffy stickers and the sheer, pink fabric, the gummy candies and the pink razor sharing, and the lipstick to cover up cold sores. Had I not been someone else, I would have been someone else. Rose water, chai latte, black coffee was my power. Beds filled with so many sleeping girl bodies, so much morning breath, so many long fingernails and shaven legs.
Being a teenage girl was the closest I ever got to being capable of magic.
I am the truest me now, non-binary, as I have ever been. I am the happiest.
But back then, I was the truest at the time, when I spoke cotton candy glitter glue, when I wasn’t sure if I wanted top surgery or to marry into the Jonas Brothers (that’s how it works, right?). When I talk about myself in adolescence I say, “When I was a teenage girl.” and it raises eyebrows, but I can’t undue the vastness of my experiences in the feminine plane, even if now I am happier standing on the edge, peering in.
above: an image of teenage me in front of a large, roadside peach sculpture (image description: a young person wearing a black top and denim cut offs with a large yellow and orange sculpture of a peach in the background)
I was not a particularly feminine child. I wore my hair cropped, I had dirty fingernails, I rarely wore eye makeup. And yet, I was a teenage girl, in a sea of us, all lipstick on teeth and broody. My adult identity cannot take that away because it has grown out of this, taken the parts I loved the most, left the rest in adolescence.
I recall my love of women being the thing that pressed my chest down into pearl, that nearly suffocated me beneath the weight of my unyielding peers. I got it all, in the afterschool specials way: “Dyke!” in the halls, tossed trash against my back on the bus. But my femininity? It was powerful and harsh, it was layers of foundation and armor of thorns, and it protected me until I could emerge, genderless and whole.
I am finally student teaching. Three times a week, I spend seven hours a day making art with teenagers. It’s made me feel further away from my adolescence than ever before and I’m grateful for it.
September 30: QPS Block Party
October 16: Qns Collab’s Makers Market
October 22: Trans Art Bazaar
