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COOL GIRL is hot, cool girl is fun, cool girl is game.
Cool girl is drunk at 3 AM, crying on the Vista staircase after dissociating in the Black Box bathroom. Cool girl never shuts up about Amy Dunne and the layers there are to dissect in the cinematic masterpiece that is Gone Girl (2014).
I know the forced hyper self-awareness of the ways I try to be a cool girl makes for good laughs and conversations about the male gaze. Though admittedly, there’s still something gut-wrenching about the realization that I truly do not know what it means to be me.
At 13, no one knows who they want to be. John Green and Tumblr made me so sure I wanted to be the down-for-anything spontaneous type—a goddamn delight. Is it my fault that I consumed movies written by perverted white men? I lived in a world that taught me my worth depended on how well of a manic pixie dream I could be to someone. Thus, I became Alaska Young, Mikaela Banes, Robin Scherbatsky, and whoever the next guy wanted me to be.
All the same, cool girls kiss boys and girls we never liked because we live in the moment. Before we know it, we’re buying a guitar to impress the bassist in the high school band, putting our hair in space buns, or watching him stream his games on Discord. Not that it was all unenjoyable. I relished these moments. I appreciated the company—the feeling that maybe this impossibly vast planet isn’t so lonely. Arms do fill the void.
Then there’s a numbness when they say “I like your personality.” I know. I made it for you.
Maybe if I intellectualize my emotions enough, this self-awareness can prove that I’m better than someone who craves validation, especially because the feminist in me detests that. Even then, there’s just something so agonizingly healing about being held together. There’s something so exhilarating when he calls you a whole adventure.
One route is to blame it on the daddy issues, wash the feeling off my hands, and reject the way my body instinctively relaxes in the other’s touch.
Instead, I embrace Eve’s rage and burn all of Eden to the ground. It’s not like I wouldn’t be justified in doing so.
In the end, the anti-cool girl really is still a cool girl, just self-aware and more interesting.
Unbeknownst to me, there’s something so “woman” about the constant grief that I’m always somehow perpetuating the patriarchy. There’s something so “woman” about the constant pain and doubt about how to just be. There’s something so “woman” about never feeling like you’re woman enough.
Still, I love being a woman. I want to be intense and angry, living a chaotic girly life. I love being a mess of a woman—uncool and unhinged, smudged mascara with curtain bangs never in place. Some guys are into that. Most nights I don’t think about that anymore.
I like to say I don’t need anyone and then cry over the fact that I truly do not know how to be alone. I am needy and anxious, and I feel things so, so deeply. I get attached after first dates and lose my appetite over texts I’ll never send. I hate being nonchalant—I’m a lover girl through and through. Unsurprisingly, the look of disappointment on a significant other’s face does sting when the edges crack and you finally show just how woman you are.
Relationships and not-relationships alike all leave something in you. I still enjoy games, going to the gym, and a cold beer—all things I picked up but are also just mine now.
I plagiarize every soul I meet. I am a collage of each person whose path I cross. What I wish 13-year-old me knew is that I could pick and choose, and then let go of the pieces that no longer serve me.
I am my mother’s sensitivity. I am my best friend’s (over-) capability to see the good in people. I am the silly conversations in Starbucks and the overwhelming comfort of doing another person’s makeup in a crowded hotel room.
I am all the love I’ve learned—and it would be such a shame to keep all of this fondness in my back pocket.
So maybe this is all of me after all.
Maybe it’s not even about me. Maybe all I have to do is exist and “be woman,” even if I never figure out what that means.
