Melissa Febos - Girlhood

FOR MOM, TO WHOM I OWE EVERYTHING AND FROM WHOM I HEARD ALL OF IT FIRST

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Abandon Me

Whip Smart

CONTENTS

Destruction is thus always restorationthat is, the destruction of a set of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise unified ontology.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away .

Adrienne Rich, Sources

The story went like this: I was a happy child, if also a strange one. There were griefs, but I was safe and well-loved. The age of ten or eleventhe time when my childhood became more distinctly a girl hoodmarked a violent turn from this. Everyone knows that adolescents rebel, girls in particular. Still, my own girlhood felt tinged by a darkness that the story of adolescent rebellion did not suffice to explain. In the years since, I have worried the question: What was wrong with me? I did not deserve to have been so tormented.

Despite how unspeakable it felt at the time, I no longer think that the pains or darkness of my own girlhood were exceptional. It is a darker time for many than we are often willing to acknowledge. During it, we learn to adopt a story about ourselveswhat our value is, what beauty is, what is harmful and what is normaland to privilege the feelings, comfort, perceptions, and power of others over our own. This training of our minds can lead to the exile of many parts of the self, to hatred for and the abuse of our own bodies, the policing of other girls, and a lifetime of allegiance to values that do not prioritize our safety, happiness, freedom, or pleasure. Though mine was among the last girlhoods untouched by the internet, I have found many of the same challenges among those whove grown up since.

For years, I considered it impossible to undo much of this indoctrination. Knowing about it was not enough. But I have found its undoing more possible than I suspected. The same way that I have taught my mind and my body to collaborate in a habitual set of practices that eventually coalesce into a skill that can be strengthened, such as throwing a softball, singing, jogging long distances, or writingso I have found it possible to train my mind to act in accordance with my beliefs (and sometimes to discover what those are). Like any process of conditioning, it is tedious, minute, and demands rigorous attention. It cannot be done alone.

It is in part by writing this book that I have corrected the story of my own girlhood and found ways to recover myself. I have found company in the stories of other women, and the revelation of all our ordinariness has itself been curative. Writing has always been a way to reconcile my lived experience with the narratives available to describe it (or lack thereof). My hope is that these essays do some of that work for you, too.

Melissa Febos

March 2020

New York, New York