#or ghost hunting at the bus loop. or my trio in middle or my writing group in junior high.

[lemuel-apologist]

thinking about that nlog phase again. we see it as a moral failing on the part of the young, that some girls want to separate themselves from the conception of girls as a whole. i know the classic rebuttals are that it's fine to be like other girls and that to viciously separate yourself in such an admittedly cringe way is just buying into the myths of patriarchy--

but what of girls who really, truly did not fit that mold? who didn't have common ground with other girls as often as they did their male peers? i didn't become like that consciously. as best i can tell, it was a response to being socially sidelined for most of my childhood. i didn't consciously notice what was happening to me until junior high, around ninth grade.

because that's what you do with weird and gross girls. girls who eat out of the trash. girls who like stage tech. girls who have a weird thing about how cool frankenstein is. girls who won't touch middle grade or YA romance. girls who cannot relate to the common experiences of their peers. i was not the one who shot myself with toy arrows at sleepovers because i thought it was funny. i was not the one casting myself as an old lady in every play. i was not the one leaving myself out of social experiences, study groups, playing at recess. it was a social phenomenon i didn't have much control over, because i was different, they knew it, and it was socially weird to have me around. taking on an aspect of "not like other girls" in retaliation to being told you are not like your peers (and this is bad) is like baby's first reclamation. it's an attitude to grow out of, but the fact is that it's the attitude that needs to change, not the aspects of your personality that your peers picked up on before you did.

#i've been thinking about adolescence for fictional/rpg reasons #worm's that age. jeanette and winona have siblings around that age. etc. #if i had an addendum to this: i FOUND friends. they were just also the 'weird kids.' we would play beyblades and kid icarus/monster high rp #or ghost hunting at the bus loop. or my trio in middle or my writing group in junior high. #even then (with the junior high group) i was still... on the outside. i suppose i've never really been liked much. #i should stop thinking that's still the case #nlog