Modeling 30 Years of Feminine Truth
A story of breaking societal expectations.
The traditional notion of “womanhood” has always been both a curse and blessing to me.
There’s two reasons for this:
One: puberty hit me like a Mac truck at 12 years old, gifting my tiny and fast girlhood self with a much larger frame than I was used to over the course of a few months. No matter what clothing I wore, I looked too adult for my age, and I was confronted with the reality that leaving the house meant attracting the terrifying attention of men triple my age.
Two: no matter how hard I tried, I could not force myself into the girlhood pipeline of coloring books to makeup tutorials and hairstyle experiments. I played with Barbies, sure, but I was more interested in making up story lines and characters than dressing them up or playacting house.
It’s sad that gendered expectations got to me so early in life, but there were several reasons I always felt out of place among my fellow females, even before puberty and creepy men destroyed any trace of my girlhood confidence.
Most of my formative years were spent without a care for getting dirty, forever scaling tree limbs or falling into any lakes or canals I stood next to, a fact that much to the chagrin of my stepmom. It seemed like I was supposed to naturally…
