My Life As A Girl

Okay, so I'm a girl.

I'm a woman, actually-- they take away your girl status the year you start using Miss Clairol-- but it all boils down to the same thing. People who have certain (ahem) characteristics are girls, and other people who have certain other (ahem) characteristics are boys. They put up little pictographs on restroom doors to remind us, lest we nod off and forget.

I didn't always know I was a girl. I was one of those pre-adolescents with perpetually skinned knees and a horse; I had a shelf full of books about wild adventures, dangerous quests, and seriously overeducated animals.

I'd have been a tomboy, if I'd known the term; the best you could say was that I was vaguely humanoid when I was washed. But then puberty hit, and with it came a few considerable shocks. Some were less impressive than others (barely B-cups, I'm afraid) but some were completely flabbergasting.

For instance, I could no longer hang from trees in my underwear with my best friends, who were, I discovered, boys. I could no longer convince anyone that I was going to be Indiana Jones when I grew up-- Lara Croft had yet to make her appearance, and the role model pool suddenly got a lot smaller.

There was Madame Curie, but I poisoned myself with my first chemistry set and my parents took it away. There was Jane Goodall, but Texas has a shortage of great apes and my little brother soon got tired of sitting in trees. There was Madonna, but her image didn't include any vine-swinging, nor anything else that looked like much fun, at least not to a twelve year-old.

As far as I could tell, boys got the good jobs like travelling the world in search of lost treasure, and girls got the crap jobs like typing and wearing pink. It was enough to give anyone a bit of a complex, even at twelve.

The psychiatric community has a somewhat controversial term for people who aren't sure whether they're boys or girls; they're called gender dysphoric. Once puberty was well underway, I was sure alright-- I knew I was a girl, but that didn't stop me from being slightly ticked off about the whole thing. I wasn't gender-dysphoric, I was gender-disgruntled.

It made me mad to discover that girls were supposed to cheer on the sidelines while the boys played football. It made me mad to discover that girls were the secretaries while boys were the CEOs. I had nothing against boys-- the male persuasion still made up eighty percent of my social circle-- but I wanted the kind of freedom that was evidently exclusive to those with a Y chromosome. To me, female equalled cage.

My gender annoyance became sort of a raison de d'etre. I spent most of my twenties proving that I could do as I pleased, girl or not. I had adventures. I swung from a few vines here and there, some shakier than others. I travelled the world-- or at least the southern United States-- spontaneously and with no regard for the so-called weaknesses of my sex. I had big fun, and plenty of the metaphorical adult equivalent of scraped knees.

But then the Miss Clairol years began.

There's something about the big 3-0 that causes a girl to take a good hard look at her life. The mirror begins to show the passage of time, and suddenly the raisones d' etre of one's twenties seem a little dated. The Big Questions begin to ask themselves, whether we like it or not.

Since I'm obviously going to be a girl for the duration (thanks to Neutral Medium Brown, $7.99 at Walgreen's) how do I make the most of it? Did women like Madonna really know what they were doing all along? What is this mysterious power that seems to resonate from the color pink? If I finally admit that I'm a girl, what does that do to my sense of independence?

And most importantly: what will happen if I die in my sleep and they find those copies of Cosmo and Glamour hidden under my bed?

(Click here for the second half of "My Life As A Girl", Laura F. Walton's contribution to HerStories, V-Day Waco's collection of personal anecdotes about life, love, and womanhood in Central Texas. To contribute your own story, visit the HerStories page of our website here.)

"Spaceball" photo from Flickr.com. View photographer's profile here.