Category: Growing Up Female

When I Was Twelve, Part I.

When I was twelve, a drunk, older guy at a Jewel concert bumped into me and loudly exclaimed that I looked like Elizabeth Shue. I turned bright red and tried as hard as I could not to smile wide enough to reveal a mouth full of braces—I knew they’d undermine the intellectual, physical, and emotional maturity that he MUST have identified in me. (’Cuz nothing says maturity like scrawling “Eat Shit & Die” on your converse, stuffing your bra, and forcing your mother to sit ten rows behind you at The Wiltern and act like she doesn’t know you…but I digress.)

This man’s attention lit me up like a goddamn FEMA switchboard in a natural disaster, but he also made me feel so uncomfortable and so unsafe. This man didn’t see me. He couldn’t see me. And I knew it.

What I didn’t know and couldn’t have known at twelve was that this brand of cognitive dissonance—a paralyzing, simultaneous ignition of worthiness and worthlessness—would eventually become my emotional calling card. Welcome to womanhood, baby girl. Good luck making sense of anything that’s happening to you.

He asked for my [parents’ home] phone number; I gave it to him.

* * *

Today, as I pumped gas at the Monrovia Shell station, an embarrassingly bad, up-tempo Jewel tune of modest, early-2000s fame—God bless that woman’s second act—blared out of the speakers. And if Big Oil doesn’t believe we should occupy public spaces in silence, then neither do I, so I started singing along at full volume. Just as we hit the bridge (“…sell your sinnn; just cash innnn…”), I looked over my shoulder and caught the gaze of an older, mentally-disheveled lookin’ dude filling up his Mini Cooper.

He looked me up and down, hungrily licked his bottom lip, smiled approvingly, and said, “You remind me of Elizabeth Shue.” I immediately remembered that night in ’96 at the concert. Jewel! Elizabeth Shue! Creepy man! Same shit—how about that? I must have looked confused rather than surprised, because Mini Cooper man cackled—loudly enough to move him from the “mentally disheveled” to “mentally unhinged” category—and added, “Elizabeth Shue is from the 90s. Who knows what you were doing in the 90s.”

“This,” I said. “I was doing exactly this.”

Welcome to womanhood, baby girl. It only took twenty years to make sense of anything that’s happening to you.

He, too, asked for my phone number; I didn’t give it to him.

img_3752

Getting Free, or: Why My Cellulite + I Got Naked + Went Swimming

blacks beach

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon alone at a nude beach, and I may never be the same. I’ve gotten pretty damn free in the last couple of years, but this was next-level. I’ll can get naked in front of most women fairly easily (thanks, Westridge School for Girls?), but this little bit of beach was populated almost entirely by men, which is a whole different psychological ballgame for me—pun semi-intended.

Anyone who has ever loved me knows that I adore sea-swimming. There are few activities that offer me the kind of simultaneous freedom and connection that being a tiny, splashing speck in ocean does. It’s the best. Just the best. And I almost didn’t swim today. Because…naked. Because…trotting to the shoreline naked!

Then, as barftastically cheesy it sounds, I remembered the woman who I want to be. I want to be a woman whose life reminds other women of their worth. I want to be a woman who doesn’t script vicious monologues about her own body in her head when she catches a stranger looking at her. I want to be a woman who knows that any man who gets this house of cellulite and stretch marks and softness (um, hi, you don’t lose 100 lbs. in a year and come out of it firm or perky…like, in any way whatsoever) is really lucky.

Not lucky because I have a “great personality” in spite of my body. And also not lucky because I think I’m better than any of my potential partners or better than any of the women whom they could have chosen to love instead. Just lucky because life is fragile, and connecting is beautiful. It’s everything.

Hate is obviously alive + breeding in our world (see: Orlando Nightclub Massacre, Donald Trump, the Stanford rape case, the countless police killings of unarmed black men nationwide, et al), so you might as well join me in throwing some love out into the universe.

Even if it’s love for your own, imperfect ass.

Thirteen

13
she had no idea.

#TBT to 2/2/97, a.k.a. my 13th birthday, a.k.a. the time in my life when I wore oxblood Doc Martins every day and posted open letters to Courtney Love on my Geocities (or was it Angelfire?) site, which was coyly called “Pigtails for Rachel.”  I can remember feeling pretty damn on top of my game that night. We had just returned to my parents’ house from the “dinner party” I threw myself at Il Fornaio (because what 13-year-old desperately trying to be a 30-year-old wouldn’t want to ring in her teen years with eight of her closest girlfriends and a classy-ass plate of capellini al pomodoro?), and I had on the best outfit I had ever assembled.  Or close to it. Micro-mini vintage polyester slip.  Docs with special-occasion silver shoelaces.  Slightly padded bra that I begged my mother to buy me for an hour straight at Macy’s on Lake.  Urban Decay lipstick & nail polish in “Gash.” Gwen Stefani wore Gash—she said so in Seventeen Magazine.

                                                                     * * * * *

Make a wish, they said.  I mean, because that’s what they say on your birthday.  I’ve always been someone who believes in the power of wishes and candles and concentration and moments of silence (light a candle—any candle— in my face, and I’ll get Fiona-Apple-on-a-rainy-day reflective on you faster than you can say “Shadowboxer”), and I remember running through the feels so hard when this picture was taken.  I had been drinking for one year, bleeding for two, and hating myself for at least ten—all things that I was pretty sure made me a Very Modern Woman in the eyes of the world.  Because women drink and bleed and hate their bodies.  Obviously.  So they told me to make a wish, and I wished for a different body and for a boy to fall in love with me.  And in this moment, the moment captured in this photo, the moment before I blew out my candles, I knew that I was wishing for all the wrong shit.  I have always had enough education and enough self-awareness to know that I am wishing for all. the wrong. shit.  And yet I have held my breath and wished for it all anyway, year after year.  I’ll be 32 in February.  We’ll see.  #throwbackthursday