the infuriating reality of womanhood

The world is not kind to the women who birth it, who tend to it until our skin is raw and our bodies ragged.

Content warning: Mentions of eating disorders, self-harm, and sexual assault.

The reference to “Women” / “Woman” in this article refers to anyone and everyone who allies with or identifies as such.

I was 6 years old when I first became aware that my body could be a problem.

Mid-morning, one meaningless summer day, my step-mom D (always my summer caretaker) stops me on the stair landing before I reach the bottom and says, “Absolutely not.”

“What?!”

“Do you see yourself? You look ridiculous. Go change.”

I’m 6 years old. I’m on my way to our neighbors’ house to play in the woods with their children.

At this point, I’ve already learned to do as D says. I march back upstairs.

It takes 4 more attempts to get D’s approval before I run out of the house, tears streaming down my face.

I have no language for this. I have no understanding of this. All I know is that somehow, I was very, very wrong.

Same timeframe and I’m going into the kitchen to tell D I’m hungry. Ever the risky ask, but I knew I wasn’t allowed to feed myself from her kitchen.

D asks me the same question every time: “Is your mouth hungry or your stomach?”

I would sit there and hem and haw and try to remember which one got me real food and which one got me a stick of gum and the hours until dinnertime

“Mouth,” I muttered tentatively.

“Classic,” D replies as she walks to her purse and pulls out a stick of Polar Ice Extra gum. “Dinner is in 5 hours.”

Now I’m a little older, sitting at D’s dinner table, and she’s made something disgusting as usual. I’m picking around at it, like I always do, until she snaps.

“Take a bite and get your elbows off the table.” What is it with the whole elbows thing…?

I take my reluctant bite, taste buds and anxiety screaming in protest because what the actual F did I just put in my mouth?

“You get one good meal a week because I know your mom can’t cook. So you’ll eat it, and you’ll like it.” And I’ll claim moral superiority and get high off of my own control… the part she said only to herself. My dad hides behind the screen of his BlackBerry, always devoid of responsibility.

I’m pre-pubescant now, longer and leaner but scawny still. Girls at school are stuffing their bras and starting to mingle with boys.

I have a crush on a boy. We exchange nervous glances in Science class. Friends have told me he likes me back. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?

I go to a birthday party. Since when were boys invited to a girl's birthday party?

He’s there.

The whole night is comprised of his friends trying to get him to talk to me, and mine trying to get me to talk to him. We’re all in the same room, completely aware of what’s going on. This boy and I, to this day, have never spoken a word to each other.

Now I’m going to sleep away camp for the first time at 12. I’m terrified. The plane lost my carefully packed luggage, so I’m in an uncomfortable, very not-me outfit from the only Target we could find. My mom leaves me with the parting line, “smile, you look like a bitch.”

At camp, the girls feel cooler than I do. They’ve done this before, they’ve kissed boys, they have trendy clothes, and flattering bathing suits. Highlights in their hair and secret cell phones they smuggled into their luggage.

They get camp boyfriends and proclaim them to be the loves of their lives.

I go home and tell all of my school friends, too, that I had my first kiss. I didn’t.

After camp, I’m on vacation with my family. Awkward and insecure as ever. My cousin shows up, she’s one of those cool girls, but only 1 month my senior in life. She’s skinny. She’s praised for it.

“How did you do it?” everyone asks her.

“I don’t know, I guess I just stopped snacking.”

Well shit. I could do that.

It’s 6 months later, December, a few days before my birthday trip to NYC. My mom makes me green eggs (no ham). I ask her what the hell is wrong with the eggs.

She tells me she’s worried about how thin I’ve become.

I snap back at her, out of sheer denial and defense, to make me normal eggs and mind her own business. She cries. I tell my friends she’s being insane. We don’t talk for two weeks.

Meanwhile, I’m exercising in my room for hours a night, skipping meals, and feeling prettier every. damn. day.

It’s a few months later, and I’m on a specific food plan but ignoring it, bitterness in my heart and frailty in my bones. We’re shopping with friends for my 8th-grade graduation dress. Nothing fits me. I catch my mom crying on the car ride home.

I make it to that graduation, but I’m on a day pass from the inpatient hospital I was admitted to just a few months earlier.

I was evicted due to insurance denial at the start of that summer. My parents took my best friend and me on vacation. Everyone loved her, and no one would look at me. Scared of what I had become. I spent the entire vacation desperate and came home suicidal. I went back into the hospital a week later.

This time around, I met a girl there, maybe 17. She seemed like everything I wanted to be. Personable, cool, beautiful, funny. She was the light of that dejected place. I admired her. We played her favorite song on repeat, she drew us pictures, and told us our futures.

Three weeks after being discharged from the hospital, I saw on Facebook that she had died in a car accident. Meaningless and random.

I went back to school and was confronted by a friend who suspected her other best friend might be having similar problems to me. Can I talk to her?

Of course.

The girl denies it. It’s awkward.

I go to our dean and tell her I think my peers could benefit from a discussion with a thought leader on mental health, specifically for girls.

Instead, we get Angela Duckworth, who gives a speech on GRIT. She is intense. She talks about how we are all destined for greatness if we forgo our wants and strive only for academic success. It will pay off, she promises us. Happiness isn’t everything, just look at her.

I have a panic attack and leave halfway through her presentation.

I make it a few more months before it all falls apart again.

Back to the hospital. At least this time the doors are not locked.

Three hospitals. All women.

Young, maybe 11. Too old, maybe 70s?

Women of all demographics and all walks of life and all experiences, each with different traumas that all led them to this same dismal reality.

On my first day in this new hospital, an extremely emaciated woman, maybe in her late 20s but looking like she was on the brink of death, throws a fit at dinner and walks out.

No one goes after her.

She returns 3 days later and collapses in the doorway. (She is fine to this day, we’re FB friends).

I met a best friend here, a kindred soul, a surrogate caretaker. Maternal to her core, but 19, sick, and reckless in the same way I was, too. She snuck us out one night late to run around on the lawn. The first time I had felt alive in years.

I met another friend here, one who made me laugh every day despite the dire state she arrived in. The first time I laughed in years.

I met a girl who pierced all of our ears in her bathroom. Now we’re sisters for life, she said. First time I felt a part of something in years.

These are the women who saved me. They were not all saved in return.

I’m back in my life, anxious and depressed, but treading above water, smiling for the camera, so to speak. My friends all have boyfriends. They’ve started wearing makeup and wearing their hair in new ways. They’ve made friends with guys and girls from other schools and started to go to their parties. They’re dumbing themselves down for acceptance. They can’t hold a deep conversation, see my pain, or acknowledge their own, but can talk for hours on end about him.

One day, a friend came to me thinking she was pregnant. She’s freaking out - and so am I, because when did we all start having sex?

Turns out she had neither sex nor a proper sexual education.

I’m angry all of the time. Angry at my upbringing. Angry at how it was handled. Angry that everyone around me is drinking a Kool-Aid I was just severely detoxed from.

I’m seeing the truth in advertising all around me. Billions of dollars spent selling women on first the problem, then the solution. No one listens to me when I try to point this out. My anger is too much, unwelcome. I need to shut up and do as I’m told.

We can't win. One day, it was silly bandz and mismatched socks with our uniforms; the next, identical North Face backpacks and Nike mid-calf socks. Since when did these arbitrary items become demarcations of our worth?

One day, I showed up to school, my hair dyed red. Not ginger red, red red. I’m carrying a pretty purple Herschel backpack. I have 9 piercings between my two ears. I am desperate for a sense of individuality in this conformist institution, where they care more about my academic success and ability to fit in than about my well-being.

I nearly died. Multiple times, and yet here I was maintaining straight As in classes I hadn’t even been present for and being praised for it. Priorities.

I’ve already been branded for my otherness because the depths of my mental illness could not be so easily masked by conformity.

But let me tell you a little secret. The popular girl who spread rumors about me, why I left school, and how my eating disorder was a cry for attention… she was coming out of my therapist’s office (who specialized in eating disorders) as I was going in for my appointment.

We stared at each other. I smiled slightly in wry acknowledgment of the irony that built in that liminal space between us. She ran out. I never saw her there again.

Tumblr slowly influenced me to become vegan with the promise of long blonde hair, a skinny body (that was more acceptable than my first attempt, apparently), life by the beach, and an overwhelming abundance of fruit. I adapt.

Now I’m lightening my long brunette hair, doing yoga after school, drinking smoothies with 9 bananas, eating a sweet potato for dinner, and regularly looking in the mirror for that promised glow. For what?

I’m still silently crying in my bathroom as I slice into my skin because this endless demand for perfection is ruthless, and I am desperate for release.

It’s the summer before senior year. My dad threw his usual $50K summer party and pulled out all of the stops. Alcohol is everywhere; it’s seeping out of our skin. My friends and I are emptying Coke cans in my bathtub and filling them up with vodka.

At the end of the night, I’m lying on my bedroom floor, ceiling spinning, and my friends are finally revealing to me how unwell they are, too. Hurting themselves, drinking too much, hating their bodies… hating themselves.

All of my friends after high school came out as queer. I love this for them, and hate this for their sad inner children that did not find safety and turned their pain inward.

I woke up to notes they had written on little pieces of paper, confessing things to me. I don’t remember why, who, or how.

We never spoke about it again.

Then, I get my own boyfriend. And I get it. I’m watering myself down for his approval. I’m catering to his emotions. I’m bending to his will.

I’m constantly waiting for him to text me back. To acknowledge me, but of course, on his schedule.

I leave for college, and he pretends I don’t exist. We had told each other we loved one another just two weeks earlier. One day, he calls me and tells me he cheated on me with a girl at a party over the weekend. I’m crushed. We break up.

I start drinking at parties because who the f*ck cares anymore anyway. Accidentally bumping myself into the least offensive boy in the bunch. We almost always ended up making out.

That is, until I come to consciousness in an unfamiliar bathroom, my shirt off, bra unsnapped, his hands down my pants, and tongue in my mouth. I don’t know how I got here. I scream and run out, half-naked, back into the party to find my friends. They had left.

Now we have a child rapist as president. Chosen over a woman. Who’s surprised?

The boys at school think it’s funny. I am crying and shaking as I wake up to the news. People will die, most will be women. I mourn them. I mourn me.

I’m tragically unwell. For many reasons. My boyfriend (ya, the same one who I forgave after he told me he made it all up and missed me…) calls me crazy when I tell him I can’t stop crying for some reason. I believe him.

I trudge through college. Luckily, I’m graduating early, good riddance.

I take my last semester of classes online. My final exam is unfortunately the same day as my grandfather’s wake. I finish college in a New Hampshire motel room and go into the next room to tell my parents what I’ve just accomplished. They don’t even say congratulations.

My mom didn’t graduate college until she was 35, because she was raised to think her purpose was marriage. Maybe deep down, she thinks mine is too?

Now I’m boarding a one-way plane to take me far, far away. My dad buys me flowers. My friends send me sappy texts. My boyfriend booked a flight to come see me in two months, promising he’s on his way to a more permanent move soon. Suddenly, with the threat of my impending absence, people decide to show up. That’s cool, I guess.

I’m far far away, at a yoga teacher training. All women of all ages. But our teacher is psychotic. She’s unsatisfied with my posture. Why do my knees turn in like that? I don’t tell her about the eating disorder that riddled my bones just a few years prior. I just contort per her request. At least until a doctor forces me to sit out the remainder of the training.

She starts taking long breaks in class to tell us about her wild conspiracies.

She got pregnant while celibate in an ashram. (?)

She doesn’t believe the holocaust was real. (??)

She thinks they will kill her for her enlightenment, and we should all be so wary. (???)

We know she’s nuts; girlhood shows up in the form of us all going to lunch together every day to talk about this wild experience we are all sharing and to collectively denounce her words.

Until her rhetoric turns racist, it’s hurting people in the class. And I am the only one willing to stand up against it.

I tell the studio owner. A white man.

Now he’s patronizing me; even going so far as to pat my shoulder as I leave his office, and nothing comes of the meeting.

What did I expect from a white ex-finance bro from NYC who relocated to San Diego, opened a yoga studio, and renamed himself Sujantra?

I still manage to give the best final yoga class out of anyone, despite not being able to practice myself. I don’t remember it, though; I blacked out.

I’m seated at my first job. A team of capable young women, led by… a white man. He ignores meetings, makes more than all of us combined, and only danes to pop in for face time when the CEO is around. He used to be the international marketing head of Taco Bell, and for some reason, we must all bow down to him before this accolade.

They ask me to make all of the content for our Black History Month, in the middle of Black Lives Matter being everywhere. I refuse, because I am not black.

There are hundreds of team members who work for us. Can I reach out to them, celebrate their work, and tell their story?

No.
My white, blonde, and acting some type of way in her cultural ignorance boss has to do it for me. And now I’m in trouble.

Fine, I quit.

Onto job number two. Another team of capable women. But wait? The business is built on the backbone of making other women feel insecure about themselves. Now I’m writing ads for boob-jobs and tummy tucks at the bequest of some rich white male surgeons.

Okay, I’ll make a difference here, find a way to do it better.

Denied.

Two years and only so many ways to sell face lifts to women who are already beautiful.

Now my boss is telling me that layoffs are coming. It’ll be her or me, and she already knows it’s her. They called me in for a meeting to tell me my work was unsatisfactory, so they wouldn’t have to pay severance if they fired me.

Fine, I quit.

Job number 3, a crafting start-up led and run, again, by women! Creative women, no less!

Oh, wait, deeply insecure women. Insecurity that we are now taking out on… each other?

Why are we always fighting?

There are 5 people working here; we can’t waste time tearing each other down. The world needs female-run start-ups like this. You started this for mothers who lost touch with their creativity. What do you mean you’re buying your tools on Amazon, calling them handcrafted, and upselling them at ridiculous prices? Who is that helping?

Oh, and now you want me to go freelance for a few hundred dollars a month, but do the same job as three people I was doing before, and you don’t understand why I’m passing on that tempting offer.

Fine, I quit.

Are we no better than the men?

At least now I have some friends. All I wanted was two girls to go to picnics and the beach with. Nothing complicated. I want more people to love.

Now you’re copying how I dress…?

Why are you looking at me like that?

Hey, I told you that in confidence!

I heard what you said about me behind my back…

Are you laughing at me for struggling mentally?

Oh, now I’m uninvited.

Who are you?

Who are we?

Who am I?

I am my fiance’s keeper.

I am my father’s chew toy.

I am my mother’s collateral damage.

I am my friend’s burden.

I am no one.

Because all of this longing to be, this molding to fit, this hope… I’ve given it all away to be liked by people only interested in themselves.

I no longer trust myself or anyone else, for that matter.

And how could I, could we?

The world demands all from women.

The ignorance and incompetence of men are all around us.

We are born deferring to them.

We grow up catering to their egos.

We look up longingly at glass ceilings, not realizing until we get closer that they are nothing more than bulletproof facades.

Did your parents, too, tell you that if a boy is mean to you in school, that means he likes you?

Have you ever been told that boys are naturally more immature? The implication being that we women must compensate in some way for their chosen ineptitude.

Have you ever said something over and over again, and had even the women in your space not listen until a man says the exact same thing?

Have you ever had your existence become the object of someone else’s objectification?

Have you ever had a man call you crazy or weak for feeling the immense impact of all that it is to be a woman in this world, and god forbid, faltering for one moment because of it?

Have you ever gone to a second-in-command woman who desperately clings to her Beta status for the authority it mirages as and asked her to hear you? See you? Stick up for you? Only to have her hide behind a man because he isn’t expected to empathize or care.

Have your friends ever (and I am guilty of this, too) bailed on you for a boy who barely gives them the time of day?

Have you ever given yourself to a boy who barely gives you the time of day?

It’s not your fault. It’s never been. Any of us.

The world is not kind to the women who birth it, who tend to it until our skin is raw and our bodies ragged. Women who give and give and ask for nothing but to reap a modecum of the reward for their work, only to see that a man has already razed it all to the ground, stripped the delicate resources, and built an empire atop it as big as his ego and as unimpressive as his d*ck.

The standards that make you an allowable woman in this world are contradictory and limiting.

Be delicate, but never break.

Be a trailblazer, but never overshadow a man.

Be an advocate and an ally, but don’t endanger a culture of normativity.

Be a friend, but not yourself in that friendship.

Be a lover, and by giving all and taking only what you get in return.

Be a daughter, perfect and infallible for daddy.

Complete the empty spaces in others, but never whole within yourself.

We are bred and raised to fill only the gaps in which we are needed by men.

We attribute our worth to our ability to contort and fill these spaces with quiet grace and whispered apologies.

We are taught to cut each other down because there is only so much space to go around.

They sensed our power early on. Long before you or I were even a possibility. They took it away, they kept us apart, they held us down. Isolated in homes. Overworked to the point of exhaustion, but never compensated because money has always been freedom.

Because they knew that if we came together, we’d be unstoppable and very likely not-for-profit.

So it really is no wonder we don’t trust anyone, not even ourselves.

But who gives us life? A Woman.

Who rises to every occasion because she knows she must? A Woman.

Who does what she is asked without thanks or respect? A Woman.

Who bears her soul for a world that offers nothing in return? A Woman.

Who holds hope unconditionally, still sensing that power within and strength in numbers?

Women.

The reference to “Women” / “Woman” in this article refers to anyone and everyone who allies with or identifies as such.

I love you,

-June

I invite you to stay and be seen here.

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