I spent the past weekend reuniting with some beloved high school friends. We laughed about the same three jokes (the bit of the weekend was that the friend we were staying with was actually visiting us and it was our responsibility to tell her the four facts we knew about Denver—did you know there are SIX professional sports teams??) caught up on everyone’s lives and spent an absurd amount of money.
This blast from the past has sparked an overflowing obsession with nostalgia and overthinking everything that has happened over the last five years.
Now that I am once again reminded that I am not just a floating head and do in fact have an impact on others I think it’s important to engage in some reflection on my previous self and what I was and still am wrestling with. I think I blocked out a lot of what happened before the pandemic just so I could keep my head down and get through it.
This week’s blog post will be a somewhat revised version of a homework assignment I wrote my senior year of college for my Gender and Fiction class. I don’t think you have to have done the reading to understand what I’m saying but….LMK.
So. This is me connecting in class discussions and our readings to the Golden Notebook. I am still fascinated by Mary Wollstonecraft’s decision to include so many different narratives about women’s experiences. Obviously, it demonstrates that there is no one universal experience of womanhood. However, it also opens up opportunities or occasions for empathy.
A lot of my personality has been shaped by the books I read between the sheets in my parents’ house. One of the most formative series of books for me was Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard.
I was entering the sixth grade and had exhausted my parents’ collection of spy novels (looking back, why was I so obsessed with becoming a literal opp???). Mom was home from work early and told me she had a treat. She’d stopped at the library and bought me this colorful set of teen-lit books at the library’s used book section.
I loved any book that gave me a glance into the world of girlhood I was too weird and wide to be invited into for more than a sleepover. The books started with a descriptive setting of the upper-middle-class girls I went to school with. They were the best friends with shiny hair, sparkling teeth, and crushes on boys that work at Abercrombie (they probably would have worn Lululemon headbands over their ears too). I was hooked.
Is this what my classmates’ lives were like?
Did they lounge by the pool and smoke cigarettes to impress the older girls on the field hockey team?
It all seemed so suburban and familiar, but I couldn’t figure out how to be accepted by the girls that lived like the ones in the opening pages.
I continued reading the series and found every part I hated about myself in these four main characters. It was a safe way to explore the mistakes I might make or were too scared to try (and I'm not talking about the egregiously stupid and violent things that the four protagonists did--I mean more like drinking underage). I’d gobble up the books in single sittings and I signed up for the waiting list when a new book was getting released.
It felt like I finally had friends.
I held Emily’s hand after swim meets and watered her blooming queerness. I felt myself growing an edgy allure as though Sara Shepard were whispering the accounts of Aria’s illegal affair with her teacher to me between classes (I mean, did that obviously creepy dynamic have to be so romanticized?). It was like looking into an exaggerated mirror when Spencer did something diabolic to her sister because she felt unloved or underappreciated. And finally, I felt safe in my screw-ups when I read about Hanna’s compulsion to steal and lie. Even her eating disorder confirmed I wasn’t alone.
Even though my parents aren’t homophobic Evangelicals, I’ve never hooked up with a teacher, and I’ve never stolen a Tiffany’s charm bracelet, these differences and details didn’t alter the connections I shared with the characters. I envied their ease and access.
Reading about the young women that lived in a world that was familiar but dissimilar from mine provided perspective to a way of existing somewhere that doesn’t want or accept who I am.
These increasingly insane books gave me the tools I needed to survive in a way that reads like thriving.
Looking back, I should’ve focused more energy on asking questions, leaning into my discomfort, and imagining new futures. But I misread a lot of these young adult books and treated them like handbooks to happiness and popularity (Meg Cabot’s How to Be Popular was a bit on the nose). It was much more difficult for me to refuse membership to exclusivity in any meaningful way and I was too scared to do anything but adjust to what people wanted.
So, I stopped reading.
I stopped thinking.
I accepted childhood chirps about how bright I was as true and worked to heal my heart by shaping it into any mold that people found entertaining or useful.
This is when I became more and more like the girls in Pretty Little Liars.
I got lost in the daily drama and shut down my interests and desires so everyone could and wanted to love me. I was made into a person who tried to be everyone. Every narrative I read or heard gave my starved persona something to sink into.
I just wanted to be laughed at.
Fiction gave me a chance to piece together the parts I’d given up in an effort to be adored.
I’m so glad I started reading again.
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