I’m A Girl, Thank God

Photograph by Natalia Oprzadek

In May of my senior year, Tess Tickner, a name rivaling Regina George, took a video up my skirt. I was walking up the stairs, early in the morning, in my public high school. She captioned it, “I can’t believe this is allowed.” Then she posted it to her Snapchat story. 

A lot of the details of the story aren’t important, other than the fact that it sent me into a spiral for months. My heart sank every time I looked in the mirror.

I’m tall, I have wide hips, and long legs. I’ve struggled to find skirts that fit me in the waist but are long enough in the back. All I could think was, if I was smaller this wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t have noticed my skirt being short if I wasn’t my size. 

While I dealt with the ripple effects of the video, my mom tried to reassure me.

“Don’t let it get to you,” she said. “You know it means nothing.” 

But that just wasn’t true to me. By merely existing I had bothered someone enough to get her to post on social media about it. My body was offensive to her. 

 I can’t believe this is allowed. 

Tess seemed to defy all logic to me. I thought that girls didn’t slut shame other girls for the clothes they wear anymore. At least, there wasn’t much of a dress code at school anymore. Since middle school, I had friends who were accepting of all kinds of beauty. I was living in a bubble. 

But, I remember how it felt good to wear that skirt. I remember how I felt really pretty that day. That confidence was annihilated, stolen from me as easily as shoplifting a candy bar. Still, I obsessively tug at the bottom of my skirts when I wear them. 

Maybe it hurt more because it was a girl who did it. I knew how boys talked about me at school. 

“You have the nicest ass,” my first boyfriend had said. He grabbed my hips and pressed himself against me while I drank from the cafeteria water fountain. We were fifteen. I expected that kind of bullshit from them. But girls? Girls were supposed to have my back.

When June came, I tried to let the sun fix all of my problems. I spent my days trying to have a movie-worthy summer before college. The kind you see edited in a montage with some terrible indie pop song playing over it. The circle of people I surrounded myself with was ridiculously large, the kind of group that could never be sustainable. I went to house parties in some guy’s basement and fought with my boyfriend about nothing at all. But I convinced myself that if I had all of that—the friends, the boyfriend, and the movie summer—I would be happy. I earned their respect. Respect isn’t understanding. At the time, I thought my boyfriend got that. At least, he didn’t get angry with me when I asked him if we could stop being intimate for a while. 

High school is a cesspool of gossiping voyeurs, of course my friends found out. I remember trying to express more than just the facts of the situation; how it made me feel, what I thought it said about society. One of my male friend’s reactions stuck with me. “Yikes.” 

Yeah, no kidding. Some reactions to my deepest emotions felt like something along the lines of “death to all girls bigger than a size ten!”

I said goodbye to my high school friends when summer ended. High school was in the rearview mirror—fucking finally. It’s easier than it seems to let go of something you’re tired of loving. All it takes are the right new people to make you forget the old ones (with the exception of a special few). Plus, living in a city makes you feel like you’re blending into the background. Boston made me feel like there were no more prying eyes.

Girls I had never met before became everything to me. On my first day of college, a girl in one of my classes wore the most beautiful heeled boots. To say it in words feels dumb and cliche, but literally just witnessing another girl’s confidence was enough for me. She wore something I’d always wanted to wear with such ease.

My female professors became everything to me. My first literature professor assigned poetry by Emily Dickinson and Marge Piercy’s Secretary Chant. We read short stories about feeling trapped in the domestic sphere, being nothing but a body and a wife. We read things that I knew subconsciously about myself, but seeing them on a page made me ill over the male gaze, and thrilled that someone else felt the same way. I broke up with my high school boyfriend when the class was over. He could not understand the changes that were happening in my head. 

My girlfriends became everything to me. They took care of me the way I had always needed girls to. My friend complimented an outfit I wore. Tights and a skirt, something I would’ve never considered senior year of high school. Then, I was too scared to express myself, even a little.

“Whenever I’m nervous about wearing a skirt or a dress to class, I think about how amazing you look when you do it,” Bea said.

I could do that for someone too. There isn’t a single body in the world like mine, but I know that we all struggle the same. I’ve died and gone to heaven if I never look in the mirror and suck in my stomach again. But I am not angry at Tess for what she did. Someone else taught her that skinnier was better, that imperfect bodies should be concealed. I’m sorry that she didn’t have people in her life to help her learn that her body is allowed.

I wear skirts often now. And I feel pretty in them.