Oh to be a Teenage Girl

I’m talking to a friend about the boy she’s seeing, and it sinks in: I am truly the last of my friends from back home to not have a significant other. And suddenly it’s like I am in junior high or high school all over again, and all I can feel is the weight of the worthlessness caused by boys not showing romantic interest in me.

A self-professed leftist feminist and I am connecting my worth to the attention of men, but it is what I was taught to do. Through my preteens till now, all I was surrounded by was girls getting attention from boys, being happy about it, being societally praised for it.

In junior high I once told my mother I was asexual. I know now that this it is not true in the least, but I had done my best to convince myself of it, so I could try and ignore the pain I felt from the lack of attention from boys. To try and tell myself that I had no interest in relationships and sex, no interest in attention from boys.

In high school I was just straight up convinced I was defective, that something about my face, or my personality, was some kind of repellent for guys. That there was something disgusting about me. It was funny, because at the same time I thought -I knew- that I was pretty and smart, but the competing side of me, the teenage girl in a patriarchal society side of me, fought hard and often won. Late in high school, I had convinced myself that because I was smart and loud and proud about this, something girls rarely are in high school, guys just did not know what to do with me. And whether that’s true does not really matter, because I know I should not have a to make reasons up to try and feel worthy.

I remember thinking that because guys did not cat call me, that I was worthless. Because I was not being sexually harassed, I was worthless. I still can not get over this, that I thought that harassment was good and important to my worth as a woman.

Eventually I do get my first kiss, and that’s nice. But I still have nothing to show to society to convince it of my worth, no relationship to justify my worth (existence?). Starting university did good to help me focus on other things about myself, and I thought of worth in other terms, but there was still a nagging voice.

And now here I am in a Starbucks, the eve of major paper being due, and I am close to tears. The dualism of how I see myself is overwhelming: a pretty and smart girl at a top university, and a girl who romantically repulses guys and holds no societal worth. Everyone tells you that a boy will come along one day, but it is hard to not think that I have already lost a race I cannot name.