CONTENT NOTE
‘Every Ode to Girlhood is an Elegy’ makes mention of self-harm.
‘My body, that invisible body that girls keep.’
— Anne Sexton, from Live or Die, ‘Mother and Jack and the Rain’[i]
We sit on the swings outside my apartment block and talk about suburban myths through mouthfuls of tapioca pearls. C says the guy at Red Lea is a creep, but he’ll give you free chips if you’re a girl in school uniform. This year is our last, though the days go by slowly. I sip my milk tea and savour the floral taste infused with bitter coffee. The sugar cuts through it all: syrupy, decadent.
Beside me, C spins herself into a knot then releases, just like I used to when I was a kid. The best part is getting dizzy with your feet almost touching the ground; seeing the sky as a distant ache of blue that you can’t touch and don’t want to. It’s the end of summer, Aquarius season—my rising sign. I feel the tides in me crashing. My heart beats fast and loud.
For most of my life, I share a bedroom. Many people find the thought of this to be impossible, though it means that early in my childhood I learn to settle into corners. I study on the dining table, draw mindlessly on large pieces of paper on the living room floor, and call friends late at night from the kitchen, with my laptop poised carelessly on the edge of a crowded benchtop. The small apartment is often cluttered with trinkets and objects left without order, wherever we can fit them—the kitchen cabinets overflow with half-empty sesame oil bottles, star anise, broken pieces of a beloved magnet, spilt bags of flour.
Perhaps it begins here, in this private yet public space, where there are no doors or locks to organise my solitude. The late nights sink into early mornings, and I begin to write when everyone is asleep. To survive and honour my girlhood, I must carve my own world of interiors.
The ages I keep a poetry blog, between fourteen and twenty, are marked by a deep sense of shame and guilt, as well as an unexpected freedom. Everything feels like the end of something; I write with a feverish desire to outlive myself and to be read in the process of becoming. I am every age I have ever been, though especially aware of being young, wanting to hold onto that feeling. In a poem addressed to myself at 25 in the year 2023, I write: ‘If you can hear my blood in your ears, maybe you’ll / remember what it felt like to be new to this world.’
On the cusp of the age I imagined I would be when I wrote this at seventeen, I feel pierced by these sharp feelings. The poem has a melodramatic and graceless tone, the tenderness of a knife’s blunt edge. In her essay ‘How It Feels’, Jenny Zhang considers the discomfort of witnessing poetic catharsis: ‘Why is the default to cringe whenever someone writes a poem about their feelings? Even worse if that someone is a teenager?’[ii]
It is obvious, but the question still lingers: Who was I when I wrote this and who am I now? Unlike a childhood bedroom that evolves and changes alongside you—the posters taken down and replaced with picture frames, the books donated, the curtains replaced—the online blog is a relic of what you could have deleted but didn’t, what survives beyond memory. I return to its pages more often than I like to admit, sometimes only to reminisce, but often in an attempt to write as I used to, with oblivious conviction. If I think everything is meaningful and worth remembering, maybe it means nothing is.
When I first see the sign, I am in my second year of university, in the basement of a bar I’ve never been to before. It’s the opening show of an exhibition curated by new friends—I feel grown-up and shy; slightly warm from being underground, as if swallowed by all the gentle lights. I spend the night talking to distantly familiar faces in quiet voices, pretending to know things, to be seen as someone worth knowing. I am good at this—or I want to be—but when the conversation dissipates, I find myself returning to an installation work by artist Athena Thebus. I stand before it like it is a bright and radiant altar, housing a silent prayer in its loud capital letters.
The words EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IN THIS WORLD IS MINE flicker in neon lights on a white wall, emitting a deep purple glow that I see even when I close my eyes.
Its desperate glow has a harsh repetition—violent, loud, and excitable, like how the chorus of a pop song always feels brighter and more memorable than the verse. Its light reflects upon other lights, casting shadows over my face. I wonder if this artwork was made for me to see it—in this space, in this light, for one brief and startling moment—my own teenage mantra scrawled in fluorescent capital letters. I want to get this sentence tattooed on my body, but I save that thought for later, and never carry it out. I want it as a tattoo, or I want to write it into a poem; want to make it into something, despite the surety of its existence without me.
u r obsessed with possession, A says when I share this desire with him over Messenger. i don’t think it’s about possession, I reply, though I’m unsure of how to continue.
I see a Tumblr post online that simply reads:
don’t interrupt me i’m girldreaming girlshopping girlreading girlcrying girlwalking girlsleeping girltalking girlsinging girldying[iii]
In Christine Tien Wang’s series of paintings White People (2018), various phrases are layered in large text over paintings of Western pop cultural images. In one painting, ‘I just want to be a white girl’ cuts into the faces of Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie in the film Girl, Interrupted (1999); the same phrase is repeated in past tense over an iconic image of Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction (1994) with a cigarette in her hand. The smoke seems to melt across the canvas, blurring the edges of the white letters.
When asked about this body of work in an interview, Wang notes: ‘I used to care a lot and I still care a lot, but I’ve worked really hard not to. Because it’s really embarrassing to make a painting that says “I just want to be a white girl.” A lot of my paintings are so embarrassing and if anything, it’s like a sign. If I feel embarrassed it’s because I’m onto something.’[iv]
‘I’m thinking of writing a memoir.’
‘About which ages?’ my professor asks.
We are having a celebratory lunch in Darling Square. That year, he is no longer my professor, but we continue to speak in the formal language I rely on. University is over, but I want someone to lecture me, press me into being.
‘Any age, I’m not sure.’ I feel hurt by his polite disinterest. I wonder if the memoir is another form of girlish narcissism, a trope, or stereotype that every young woman in their twenties is absorbed by.
To write about girlhood is stylish and desirable; to romanticise it is boring, unrevolutionary. It’s difficult to write around the years I hurt myself, out of fear of misremembering, or self-protection. For the same reasons, I imagine I might write about myself without mentioning race, just this once, but the lines are already blurred and entangled even without my intervention. I keep trying and failing to fit the past into a neat angle, with a linearity that refocuses the haze of memory.
With the rigour of a student, I try to dissect it. In my final year of university, I attempt a project on autoethnography. It doesn’t get published, and I give up on tightening the language to make it make sense. It feels too much or too simple to say I want to know what I didn’t know then. I want the years to fall away and reveal something pure and light inside of me, I want to be unchanged but also different, unrecognisable to myself. I am reading and rereading the poems I wrote in secret for strangers to read, their comments untouched without a reply, how an older man once emailed me ‘good luck to you and your lovely struggle.’
In Heather O’Neill’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Corpse’, she writes of girlhood as violence:
There is a moment when you are a teenage girl when you don’t belong to anybody. You aren’t really a daughter. You aren’t anyone’s partner. You aren’t related to anyone at all.
I fell madly in love with everything. Everything made me excited. Drinking coffee out of a cracked cup with a yellow rose on it. The covers of paperbacks in bookstore windows. The smell of skunk as I walked along the train tracks.[v]
The adult tendency to fixate on those years of freedom, like an elegy for what is now lost, is a familiar and comforting narrative; one that is not dissimilar to the patriarchal figure of the girl-dreamer made passive and feminine, a creature we only see in distant and beautifully sad fragments. In an essay on the trajectory of girlhood and how we continue to write of it longingly, Katy Waldman suggests, ‘If women can grow attached to a vision of their younger selves as uncommonly pure, creative, and powerful, perhaps it’s because such insistence helps us to process the wrongness of what happened next.’[vi]
I am unsure of what happens next, how to piece together the emptiness that seems to settle in my body. The experience of girlhood and our lingering mediation is a simultaneous disappearance and reappearance. I think of the poem addressed to my future self and the self I have become, merged into one.
Or, I think of Lucie Brock-Broido: I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost.[vii]
I feel older now, I didn’t then. I never left my hometown, so I still see traces of C every now and then. On my way to the station, I walk past her dad’s bakery, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, though I’m unsure of what I’ll do if I find her there, amidst the pastries and sesame buns, unchanged from the girl in my memory. All I see is my reflection in the glass and the rush of the morning shoppers through the window—typical, overused metaphor.
It’s a cloudy afternoon, but the rain doesn’t break. I take a train and then a light rail towards the city. Later, in a cafe with my friends from university, we talk earnestly about the pandemic and the years we lost to it. E says their girlhood was defined by leaving it behind. P says she still feels young, like there’s so much time.
We sip our coffees, holding them to keep our hands warm. We talk and we keep talking, drawing parallels, fixing each other’s hair, breaking our food into pieces to share. When everything is so freely given, at this moment, I don’t feel any loss. Everything beautiful in this world is mine reverberates in these spaces, like the light that Thebus’ sign reflects or emits, a reminder of how bright and glaring some feelings might be; how incongruous and noisy.
When I walk home alone, the clouds are heavy but don’t erupt. I almost want it to rain so I can describe it in a certain way. The sky moves and darkens, a vast and nameless blue.
[i] Anne Sexton, ‘Mother and Jack and the Rain’, Live or Die, 1966, Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
[ii] Jenny Zhang, ‘How It Feels’, Poetry Foundation, 1 July 2015, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70231/how-it-feels.
[iii] menace-bitch, 17 January 2023, https://www.tumblr.com/menace-bitch/706634983135232000/dont-interrupt-me-im-girldreaming-girlshopping.
[iv] Gwen Hollingsworth, ‘Interview with Christine Wang’, Graphite Journal, 11 February 2019, http://www.graphitejournal.com/interview-with-christine-wang/.
[v] Heather O’Neill, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Corpse’, The Walrus, 20 June 2018, https://thewalrus.ca/portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-corpse/.
[vi] Katy Waldman, ‘Why We Mourn Girlhood’, The New Yorker, 7 April 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/why-we-mourn-girlhood.
[vii] Lucie Brock-Broido ‘A Girl Ago’, Stay, Illusion, 2013, New York, Alfred A. Knopf.