just alisha things

The buildup to my birthday usually consists of three things: dread, questioning, and self-scrutiny. This has just been the norm for me since leaving my early twenties. Gone are the years where I woke up and marked the days off in my diary before the big day arrived, and where I spent weeks anticipating a big party. Turning a year older has become an extremely reflective process for me, and I am left questioning what it means for me, what it means for my future, and do I have everything figured out yet? (The answer to that question is a big, fat, resounding nope.) However, this summer I haven’t really felt that existential dread much, and instead I have been experiencing a period of liberation. I think at twenty-five I gradually started to learn to not care so much what other people think of me, and this has opened up a lot of internal doors, and I seem to have given myself space to feel a bit more freedom. Freedom to say what I want, like what I want, and do what I want. This newfound freedom has enabled me to do something else; being able to reclaim my girlhood.

If you’re asking what that means, I don’t think I’d have known until recently either. Essentially, I have always felt like I grew up too fast and didn’t get to savour my childhood properly. This happens to a lot of girls and women for different reasons. Mine were mainly being body shamed from a young age, being bullied, navigating my parents’ separation, and having a stalker at the age of fourteen (yeah, that last one is a biggie if you haven’t read my other post about it). All these separate events had a knock-on effect on my self-esteem and confidence. I was always told “You’re so mature for your age”, and I viewed this as a good thing back then, but maybe it wasn’t? Was I meant to be mature at eight or nine years old? I remember feeling the pressure to be, and that was the start of a very long road of rushing to a new identity that was always just out of reach: womanhood. It was placed on me so much that it became a desire of my own too, and only recently, as I turn twenty-six, do I realise the full magnitude of how much I gave up for it.

When do we officially feel like adults? Is it the first letter addressed to you in the mail? Your first paycheck? Getting your driver’s licence? You think as a child that as you tick off these milestones and ‘adulthood markers’, that must mean you’re inching closer and closer to having it all figured out. When I was younger, “The Devil Wears Prada” was my favourite film, and it was the first future I envisioned for myself that didn’t include princesses or being the next Hannah Montana. How desperately I wanted to strut down an inner-city street, Starbucks in hand, glancing at my reflection in the skyscraper windows at my immaculate hair and outfit on the way to my challenging but rewarding job at a glossy magazine company. Around the same age, I started to feel pressure to have the best grades, have a boyfriend, and be good at everything, marking the start of the loss of my girlhood. But you obviously can’t comprehend this yet, and you won’t for a long time. You see adulthood through rose-tinted glasses—an unknown but magical territory where everything works out for you and the world is fair to you.

That was the journey from there on out. Slowly but surely, I started to lose myself in my hurry to be a woman. Fast forward nearly a couple of decades, and I am left wondering, have I accomplished my goal yet? Do I have that freedom, independence, and Hollywood fictional luck that I dreamed of?

No, because adulthood is an elusive social construct that we, as young girls, are taught to conform to with no choices given. It starts by being told your skirt is too short at six, being told to “sit like a lady” at seven, and being told if a boy is mean to you, it’s because he fancies you at eight. Everything we do and enjoy is eventually devalued. You learn that you must live your life a certain way and be a certain type of girl, or else you will forever be self-conscious, unsure, and outcast, even into womanhood.

In my late teens and early twenties, I was always so driven towards my goals of passing my driving test, finding a career, and finding love that I think I ran towards my future with a blistering pace. I had no time to think about what I was leaving behind. My 25^th year was a year full of achieving these goals. It’s been a pretty transformative time for me, but only now, after stopping to take in my surroundings, do I realise that adding these notches to my belt hasn’t really changed much. I don’t feel like an adult yet. I’m a manager, I pay bills, I’ve had my smear test (!!!), and yet that image of an “adult” that I curated all those years ago is still a long way away. Why have I always been in such a rush, and why did I hasten the best years of my life to end up wanting to be where I started?

So, if I’m not an adult but I’m not a child, then what am I? I don’t feel like either of these identities belong to me, and instead I am in a fraught no-man’s land where I left behind my girlhood without a second thought and have spent years striving towards womanhood because I thought only then would I have it all figured out. I felt like the older I got, the more I’d be able to do my own thing, free from rules, discipline, and routine. But if anything, life as a woman burdens you with more rules and judgement than you can ever imagine as that young girl with stars in her eyes. I could try to put it into words, but the iconic monologue from the new Barbie film articulates it perfectly:

“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behaviour, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining.

You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that, but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”

That is what we sacrifice our girlhood for. We free ourselves from the confines of parenting, school, and order just to shackle ourselves again with these rules imposed on us by a patriarchal society—the rules we thought were conditional and would go away when we “grew up”. Life as a woman is hard, and if I knew then what I know now, I would have clung on to my girlhood for a few more years.

I miss feeling free and thinking without consequence. I miss just bursting into dance whenever the notion took over me. I miss feeling like I was the cleverest seven-year-old ever because I knew how to spell words like “foreign” and “receipt”. I miss playing out on the street until the last sunray of the day was enveloped in nighttime clouds because I was determined to learn how to ride my bike properly. I miss truly believing in myself because at that stage I knew exactly what I was: I was a daydreamer and a romantic and an animal lover and I was excellent at skipping and handstands and I found everything funny. That was the sweet spot of my childhood before I started being told I wasn’t good enough, before I started to compare myself to other girls, before I started thinking, “But then what happens?” after everything I did, before I was told to neutralise myself to be acceptable. I have been searching for this freedom and agency ever since.

I think the closest I got to feeling like a girl again was when I started university. I think I felt so liberated moving away from home and having a fresh start that I stopped worrying and overthinking and felt like I just wanted to live. If I wanted a slice of cake at 11 p.m., I went and got it. If I wanted to make pancakes for dinner, I would. If I wanted to spend my time learning silly little dances and having photoshoots with my friends, I did. I was fully absorbed in living life with my friends, having fun, and feeling free, and this is what I wanted adulthood to be. But eventually you start to become consumed by looming responsibility, pressure, and expectation again, and this takes precedence over your happiness and freedom. I became so busy trying to keep up with the demands put on me in terms of grades and finances that I had no time to be a girl anymore. I had to leave her behind again so that I could succeed. I think a lot of us go through this transitional phase as we enter our twenties, where we are told that we have to silence ourselves and distance ourselves from our needs and what we know. We have to be palatable and conform to the image that is required of us, effectively placing ourselves in emotional straitjackets. These straitjackets don’t just tell us to numb our emotions; they also tell us that the space we are allowed to take up in the world is extremely limited. This spans across our interests, our hobbies, and our likes and dislikes, and we are so busy navigating this that we disengage from what makes us us.

All of this leaves me with an important question: Is there a point of no return?

That’s for me to decide, and I’m deciding to claim my girlhood back in the hope that it’ll heal the girl in me that never felt like she was really finished. I can’t remember when I suddenly started being embarrassed by liking the colour pink and when I ditched the things that were “too girly” because of the fear they would make me uncool. I got rid of my toys, my diaries, and my dolls without even a second thought, and now I wish so badly I still had them so I could remember the girl that I used to be. I wish I’d kept my dozens of diaries to see what she thought of the world and her future, because I’m so disengaged from her that I can’t remember. I wish I’d kept the battered Teletubby toy I carried absolutely everywhere with me (LaaLaa, ifkyk) to see how I was able to love something material so intensely. I wish I’d kept the fairy ballerina Barbie I so clearly remember but can’t find despite hours of trawling the internet. I feel like I didn’t leave myself much to connect the older version of myself to who I was in my formative years.

I want to like the colour pink again without feeling like it’s too girly. I want to spend the next nine months making friendship bracelets in preparation for seeing Taylor Swift in concert. I want to have sleepovers with my friends where we have singalongs and put the world to rights until 3 a.m. I want to journal my everyday thoughts and musings down before I go to bed every night. And I don’t want to be embarrassed by this, or embarrassed by the notion that that girl still exists.

When we think of being a girl, we think of being innocent, naïve, inquisitive, and curious. But to be a woman is to be mature, confident, wise, and strong. Is it not possible to be all of these things at once? Can I not be childish and too emotionally attached to my teddy bear while also being mature and working a corporate 9-to-5 job? Can I be naïve and curious as well as be able to appreciate the fact that I know so much and have learned so much from my life so far? I think there has to be a secret power hiding in the combination of these two concepts: using the knowledge, life lessons, and wisdom that I’ve picked up along the way, as well as deciding I don’t want to play by the rules that have been dictated to me and other women for the majority of their lives. That, to me, is my own definition of living a rewarding and authentic life, if I can find a way to bring the girl buried inside me along for the ride.