There’s something sinister that happens to girls from the ages of 10 to 18. These 8 years are some of the most critical and fragile years for most girls. At least they were for me. The curse of puberty begins to rear its ugly head and all of a sudden the childlike wonder and innocence that was once there disappears overnight. At age 11, I suddenly became hyperaware of how I looked and how I was perceived in the world. And ever since, I have been trying to return to the girl who never cared about how her body looked, how her voice sounded when she spoke or what people thought of her. That carefree girl that I used to be is constantly fighting to claw her way out because her mind was free from all these insecurities.
I remember the first time I became aware of how my body looked. I was going through puberty and my boobs were just starting to come in. That day I was wearing these orange capri pants with a tank top. Someone made a comment about how my boobs were so small that they looked like mosquito bites in my tank top. At the time, I just laughed it off but in the back of my mind I was taken aback and irritated because who even thinks to say something like that out loud to a child?
And just like that, this was the first time someone made me feel insecure about something that was out of my control.
2016 was also the time when BBLs and social media baddies were taking over the internet. I was 15 years old wondering why I didn’t have abs, a small waist and a big round butt. At the time, I didn’t realize just how fake social media was. A lot of these people were getting very dangerous surgeries while also heavily editing their pictures. Have you ever seen a BBL in real life? It looks very different from what it looks like in instagram pictures.
Because this was the beauty standard during that era, I just assumed that there was something very wrong with my very normal teenage body. It wasn’t until my early 20s that I started rejecting society’s idea of what a girl should look like or how she should behave. We are socialized on what’s acceptable for a girl to do and what she should not do. And in this process, we tend to lose ourselves and the things that make us unique. I have this theory that our 20s are meant for us to find ourselves again and like the things that we used to enjoy in our childhood and teenagehood with no shame. It is a time to reclaim our girlhood and do things our way.
Over the past few years, I have been going through a girlhood renaissance. I have been making a conscious effort to rediscover the girl who I once was, the girl who was filled with childlike wonder and was excited about the little joys in life. In my self-discovery journey, I realized that in order to truly find yourself you must abandon societal expectations, you need to stop caring about what people will think or say, you have to try new things to discover what you like and what you don’t like, you must date yourself and you must hold onto those little things that make you happy. Go to that concert, go on that solo trip, post that cute picture that you’ve been scared to post, buy yourself flowers, wear that cute outfit and take yourself to dinner…there’s so much to discover about yourself and so much to live for. And when you find yourself again, hold on tightly and dearly to that girl.
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