Rooms Full of Girls

“Being a girl was never easy”. I fully object this statement. Being a girl, a human being, is neither hard nor easy. It’s far more complicated than that. Girls, women, are not black and white concepts. It’s not about being a smart girl or a tomboy or girly or sexy. It’s not about the way we dress or the way we walk. It’s about understanding and truly accepting what it means to be a girl for each one of us. Social media is becoming one of the strongest tools in our possession to use as a way to unite girls everywhere and help everyone with an internet connection understand the joys and complications of girlhood.

It’s 2016 and young girls with big voices like Rowan Blanchard and Amandla Sternberg are using these voices to give girls more room. Give girls enough space to create and to think and to understand what and who they are and what that means to them. Spaces like blogs and magazines and tv series and movies. Spaces like stand up comedy shows or interviews on Ellen. Spaces for girls to express their own mind, how it truly thinks, not how it’s functioned to think in order to fit a prefixed mould given to us disguised as freedom to choose who we are. We have so many ideas enforced upon us by people who claim they want to help us and breaking those moulds is a hell of a big step which we are already taking.

Even with that breaking done, however, there’s far too much competition between girls. Starting from a really young age we’re put in situations like competing for the same boy in kindergarten and, sadly, all throughout high school none of that changes into anything less than gossiping and pitting girls against each other. Nobody stops to think about the bloody pink nails we have from trying to climb our way to the top while grabbing the dresses of our fellow girls and pushing them out of our way as if we don’t know, deep down, that if they succeed then that means we can too. When girls succeed, it means more of us can do it. It doesn’t matter who got there first, it just matters that it happened.

Thinking of girls from all over the world as strong, no matter what that strength is, is what will win our battles. It’s how the climb on the mountain that left us bloody and exhausted will become a hike on a Sunday morning before brunch.

Go out (or stay in and type it in all caps on twitter) and urge others to see girls’ problems as their own: because girls aren’t some exotic creatures raised from flowers and everything nice. They can be vicious and manipulative and they can make you fear them. Because girls can’t be described in one sentence as one herd of sheep up for slaughter. We simply cannot say “girls are” and expect an accurate representation of girls. Girls are nothing but who they are individually. Girls are not magic, girls are real. Girls are not represented as one but they should be united as one. Show the world what girls are really made of. And to my girls at the bottom of the mountain; I’m coming down to push you up so you can keep your nails intact.