When I wrote about coming here I did a post called 'True Girl Power' in which I talked about the women who made me who I am. I included myself in that list because feminism and loving women starts at home. I talked about making teenage Claire proud because she had a rough time, and largely hated herself and wasn't brave or strong or anything but just trying to survive high school and get straighter hair.
Then I went through a box of things I keep to remind me of all the happiness and love I've been privileged to have and receive. it largely contains cards and notes and letters now because I make the effort to keep it in one box and I don't need to remember every activity I ever did but I do need to read those words sometimes. The majority of the best, and most detailed ones, date from about 2005-2008. I was just a teenager and I wanted to be popular and pretty and that was all really. I made a lot of very close friendships because I was lucky enough to go to a big school where you could be bullied consistently and simultaneously have loads of friends.
We wrote each other a lot of long detailed cards and letters, sometimes for no occasion at all. We loved each other so intimately and fully and I learnt everything about being emotionally open and what real friendship looks like in those years.
These letters though, they use the words 'brave' and 'strong' and 'confident'. Words I would probably never use to describe myself at age 15. I can't even imagine what I would have been doing to prove this to anyone. How could this girl who desperately wanted everyone to like her, wanted to stand out so badly but also just more than anything just really wanted to be pretty, could possibly have done to be considered brave or strong? Someone was lying. It wasn't my friends who knew me so well, and loved me so dearly then, and now. It was me, I had lied to myself my whole life.
I would use those words now. The cards sat on my desk in Amman from my friends look much the same as they always did. Now I believe them because I live it, I've seen it, I am all of those things and I finally stopped worrying about being pretty. I have learnt that I am beautiful and that it also does not matter.
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| 2008. |
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When I was in primary school I told one of my friends I didn't like her. Actually, I did this more than once. I tried to ditch friends I had nothing in common with, or I didn't feel comfortable around, all the time. Now we would call that self-care, and leaving toxic friendships, or just plain sensible management of our little spare time. In Year 6 I was just being disruptive and mean. When I explained my reasoning to other friends I used the same reasons I would use now. Now I share stories of leaving friendships and feel proud of the control I've taken of my life and deciding who deserves my time. When I was 11 this just made me a troublemaker and all-round pain in the teachers ass.
When I was 15 my GCSE Maths teacher despised me. I was disruptive, surrounded by girls I had clicked with in a way that only happens once in a millennia. We were a complete nightmare. I was too loud and I didn't care and she told me I wasn't funny and I didn't really care about that either. I am both of those things, I hope I always am. It is my honest opinion that those are two of the boxes that women are told we should never tick, and I've been ticking them for a very, very long time. I remember being a good student because I had unrelenting respect for authority but the evidence would suggest I just got lucky with my other teachers and I had zero time for the ones who didn't want us to be individuals.
All through high school I thought I could be friends with everyone, I didn't want to be a shrinking violet like not-very-good-looking girls with bad hair should be. I knew I could talk to everyone and I very near demanded public verification of this. I didn't get it. I was treated differently because I wasn't the right person but I remained wholly unable to accept it. Then people laughed at me behind my back (and to my face; the bullying could be pretty vicious). Now you better believe no one is laughing if they don't show me the respect I know I deserve. I knew I deserved it then, I just didn't know I had it in me to turn people away if they didn't show it.
I could also be a nasty little bitch. There I said it. I can be cutting now and I didn't develop this very niche skill overnight. When I look back through notes sent to my friends across the classroom, I see the people who bullied me being verbally decapitated. Some of it makes me wince. Boys who didn't want to date me also weren't safe and in that respect absolutely nothing has changed. I've always had a way with words, and I didn't always use it for good. These people did make my life hell, though. Now no one does that, but if they did I would say it to their face. I've been told fighting with me isn't pretty. You should hear what I said about that kid in who made fun of my bad skin in Year 10.
* * * *
Even rationally, the way I remember makes no sense. If I was so under confident then how could I have spent every year between the ages 7-17 on stage? If I was so weak and generally average personality wise, how did I keep so many of the friends I made as a teenager to this day? If I was so quiet and unable to speak up, where did this voice, that I use so frequently now, suddenly come from? You are who you always were, and you owe your past self for your present self's best qualities (and your worst).
I was always kind, and loving. I always appreciated friendship and gave my all to it. I was always smart. I have always been a writer. I have always known all of these things. The thing is though, is that if you're not making waves with some people, some of the time, you're almost definitely letting yourself be treated badly.
I wrongly remember myself as a pushover who didn't care for herself, who let herself be bullied and pushed and pulled by people who were no good and didn't realise it. All that is true, bar the fact I didn't know it. Oh boy, did I know it, and teenage Claire was pushing and kicking back in the very limited ways she knew how and to the extent that she could without becoming a problem for the school and her parents.
Now, I'm still saying much the same things, I just shout a little louder.
I'm heard more clearly and easily because I'm an adult and that by default makes my opinions more valid. I have a bigger platform and I give less of a shit who hears what I have to say. I give love just as freely, but I stand up for myself more frequently because I don't have to worry about someone telling me I don't know what's best for my well-being and threatening formal discipline if I don't agree.
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| 2015. |
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We don't listen to teenagers when they tell us what they want and need. We think they don't know.
Maybe this wouldn't be such a problem if this overruling of teenagers wasn't a precursor to the larger message that women are wholly irrational for the rest of their lives too.
Even in my own mind I feel like I've lurched between quiet and weak to strong and all-together too loud. I lived in a world that didn't take me seriously so I remember wrongly that I didn't have a voice, and wouldn't have known what to say anyway, and that was my fault. I didn't have a voice, that was because I wasn't allowed one. When I see teenage girls on Twitter complaining about people who are mean to them at school I don't see bitching. I see girls pushing back and calling out in the very rare spaces we're offered when the institutions we're part of tell us to be quiet in favour of creating a 'conflict-free' space.
We don't love and respect school-age girls the same way we love and respect adult women because we remember our own teenage selves wrongly. We were filled with strength and bravery and confidence but we didn't exist in a situation where we could express it. We don't remember being that way because when we expressed it we were, by and large, told to stop because it was considered disruptive. Quiet teenage girls can grow to be adults with very loud voices once they realise they can finally be heard; we should take care of them until then. We should take them seriously when their voices do make it through; what they're saying is important.
The noise I was making was only low-level because I didn't have the tools to understand why I was being silenced. Now I understand, and I only make more noise in response. I didn't gain my voice overnight, I always knew what I had to say, now I can say it out loud.
So here's to my teenage self, may I now remember her as she was, and as all teenage girls are: strong, brave, confident.
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