Sierra Burgess is a loser — and the leading lady 15 year-old me needed most

“Sierra, you are beautiful, but you are so much more than that.”
When I say that I cried over Netflix’s newest romantic comedy, “Sierra Burgess is a Loser,” please don’t think I speak in exaggerations. What started as discrete tears doubling as sweat during my morning workout on the elliptical turned into a gentle sob fest in the comfort of my own home — I’m teeming with emotions, always, but I do have a shred of personal dignity left in me.
Sierra Burgess’ spirit is one that I identify so deeply with, that it felt as though Netflix had sifted through footage documenting my own high school experience, cast the stellar Shannon Purser as me, and distributed it for profit without my knowledge. There’s definitely a copyright violation in there somewhere, but I’ll spare them a lawsuit simply because it was a damn near exceptional movie.
Speaking as a former high school loser, I related so deeply to Sierra’s anxieties about not being the kind of girl you were told, time and again, that you ought to be. Finding comfort in words interwoven in the spines of books, or splayed out in tepid cursive on the lined paper in front of you. The ripples of self-assurance amid crashing waves of second guessing, romanticizing, wishful thinking.
People often underestimate the crippling loneliness of going it alone in high school. They minimize the courage it takes to stand in favor of originality — originality at a time where the all-consuming thought on most teenagers’ minds is how to fit in. The conviction in one’s self, often at odds with others’ perceptions of you, is no easy feat.
I spent much of my high school years consumed by these same questions, albeit with a stubborn streak and a sense of conviction that told me that there was a light on the other side of the tunnel worth getting through to on your own terms, not someone else’s. I didn’t have the social securities of an in with the popular crowd or an exceptional talent in sports or music, nor the kind of appearance placed on pedestals and reflected on just about every television or movie screen.
But I grew up in a family, like Sierra’s, that didn’t emphasize any of that. I had a mother who called me intelligent and a father who praised me for being strong. I was not belittled or chastised for showing emotion — even when I definitely was being more than a little melodramatic. I had parents who showered me in books and supported my greatest academic dreams, because that was what was valid in their eyes. Empathy. Strength of character. A keen desire for learning.
15 year-old me would’ve taken great comfort in a leading lady like Sierra Burgess, seeing a reflection of myself wrapped in her bulky sweaters and quizzical eyes. Finding a woman whose intellect and kindness are acknowledged first, her looks second. A woman who doesn’t have to be beautiful — unconventionally or not — to be seen as worthwhile.
“You are a magnificent beast.” The very first words of the film, spoken in front of a bathroom mirror on a crisp fall morning. It breathes possibility and hope in a new start for what Hollywood, and society more broadly, allows itself to see as a story worth telling, and a woman worth loving.
When Sierra looked in the mirror after uttering those words, with her quirked smile, open eyes, and a radiating sense of promise: It was as if she was speaking directly to that 15 year-old version of me, caked in dust and shrouded from years of internalizing the own anxieties and pressures I felt over being “enough.”
It was a coaxing whisper to women and girls alike, regardless of their appearance or age and sexual preference or intellect or life experience that we are enough.
Period.
The superficiality of life doesn’t disappear the second we ignore its persistence. What does is the influence it has over our sense of self-worth and our being.