What Takes Up More Room in My Closet: Me, or My Shoes?

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The Proud Female who Plays with Dinosaurs and Swears like a Sailor

            All of my life I’ve never really felt as if I fit into the check box of a “girl.” I do identify as a woman, and I am proudly a woman, but I never really understood why I was expected to act certain ways or maintain certain stereotypes.  When I was about 5, my mother took away my toy dinosaurs.  She said that they weren’t girls toys and encouraged me to play Barbies or Polly Pockets with my sister. She bought my sister me an American Girl Doll, and continued to push for me to choose those toys over my preferred toys: my trains and my dinosaurs.  I remember pretending to ballroom dance with my sister as a child. I always wanted to dance the male part, as I felt that’s what I identified more with. Never because I felt like a boy trapped in a girls body, but because I didn’t feel like society’s idea of a girl. I was never dainty. I was never quiet. I liked to play rough and wanted to ride my bike with no hands like the boys who played in the street over from mine.
             Reading about the “Good Girl” expectation in Barreca’s text felt all too close to home. All of this was shoved down my throat so harshly that all I wanted to do was retaliate. I wasn’t like my Good Girl friends. I didn’t stay quiet in class. I didn’t want to change myself to be what boys wanted from me. I didn’t play innocent. All throughout elementary school, I wanted to be seen as equal to the boys. I couldn’t wrap my innocent mind around the fact that I was going to be expected to act a certain way just in order to make other people happy.  That was until middle school came around. All of a sudden I couldn’t be friends with guys. I couldn’t act like the guys. I had to be the Good Girl if I wanted to make it out alive.
             Like Barreca mentions in “They Used to Call Me Snow White...” in order to be accepted by the guys and not be torn to shreds for having “no sense of humor” (whatever that means,) I took the harassment. As my chest developed, I took the jokes about my breasts and I laughed them off because after all that must be what I am supposed to do.  I adopted the self depreciating humor into my normal every day conversation in order to fit in amongst boys and girls alike. Boys appreciated that I attacked myself so they could continue to feel superior, and girls jumped in by one-upping my self deprecating comments by tearing themselves down worse, or proclaiming whatever was wrong with them was way worse than any thing that could ever be wrong with me.
            Along with what Fey mentions in “All Girls Must Be Everything”, I began to realize even more was wrong with me as girls complained about things they were experiencing which I was also experiencing. I’d previously not seen an issue with these things, but as soon as someone pointed it out as an issue in themselves, it then became this huge flaw in myself. Through all of this, I continued to use humor to laugh off these flaws, secretly hoping maybe if I made people know me as the funny girl, they would ignore all of these flaws society pinned to my existence.  Being known as the funny girl only lasted for so long.  These jokes I pinned against myself began to only open doors for people to feel more welcome to tear me down.  I feel this happens quite often as humor is misunderstood.  Ali Wong joking about her promiscuity in her younger years may seemingly open the door for people to attack her for being promiscuous.  It may make people feel as if because she is joking about this herself that she won’t care if someone makes a joke to her about her being a “slut” or a “whore” or any other beautiful name women are often called for having sex (I could easily go into how when men have lots of sex it’s celebrated, yet for women it’s highly frowned upon, but I am sure you can all assume where that conversation could go.)
           Through my comedic take on my pain and awkward teenage development, I opened the door for people to only wear me down even thinner until I utterly fell apart.  I had filled every ounce of my soul with self hate and disgust because my “coping” jokes actually tore me apart where it was supposed to be a band aid which covered up the wounds, not pulled them open every day refusing their healing process. As a few other blogs mentioned how self love is a journey that they’re traveling, changing the internal dialogue which narrates their day. After falling to pieces from years of self depreciating humor, I made the same change. I still follow the expectations of female humor and make jokes about  “women’s things”, but any guy I spend time around will tell you I have the mouth of a dirty sailor. I am again fully comfortable with saying “I don’t fucking care what you think” (like Poehler) in regards to what a man, or any human for that matter, tells me I can or can’t do.
            Self love and moving away from home freed me to take my journey to be myself once again.  Honestly, I hope my journey is never ending. I hope I’m able to love myself more and more each day. I hope I’m able to make people laugh each and every day, hopefully without tearing myself to shreds every time.  Will I continue to roast myself because that is just my type of humor? Probably.  But will I continue to say “fuck you” to any expectation someone has for how I’m supposed to act, think or speak? An unwavering strong Y E S. Reading these texts only made me feel stronger. It is always motivation so to hear another woman publicly say, “Yeah, I’m doing my own thing, and no one can stop me.” I hoe that wave carries on and is able to reach every woman.