Pretty, small, & quiet
“The world wants girls to be pretty, and small, and quiet.”
Glennon Doyle, Love Warrior
When I heard this sentence spoken as I listened to the audiobook, it struck me. Hard. Like a slap in the face. But more like a punch in the gut. I had a visceral reaction. I was standing there in my kitchen, chopping vegetables for dinner while listening to the SuperSoul podcast, and my stomach started to hurt and I began to cry.
I realize now that those tears and pain came so suddenly because this truth had been bubbling up in me for 30-some years. And in that moment, hearing those words come out of someone else's mouth, it finally began to boil over and I no longer had the desire or the stubborn will to push it back down.
In December 2016, burnt out from work and at an emotional crossroads, I began seeing a therapist for what I thought I needed: help in dealing with work-related stress from being a control freak and perfectionist. It turns out, as it most often does, what I needed was so much more. So much deeper. So much less innocuous.
It's been two years of deep work, of looking within myself and around myself and creating the space to accept and understand that so much of who I have been—this workaholic perfectionist control freak—is a function of deep-seated beliefs I have held about myself. And I'm only beginning to understand how inextricably linked those beliefs are to this idea of what the world wants from girls.
But let me start at the beginning. I made my grand entrance into the world slightly before I was expected to. I was in a breech position (butt-first) with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck.
(It's not lost on me now that how I came into the world as an infant is so often how I feel as I live in it as an adult. Like I'm somehow going about things the wrong way. Often making an ass of myself. Feeling trapped and constricted. As anyone who knows me can attest, I'm always getting to places more quickly than would be expected, both literally and metaphorically. And as in my arrival into this world, obstacles be damned, I will find my way.)
So because coming out butt-first with the cord around my neck wasn't the best scenario back in 1980, my mother's doctor performed a c-section to get me out of distress and bring me into the world. This was the same doctor who had told my mother after my two brothers' births and her three miscarriages that, for her own health, she shouldn't try to have any more children. But she and my dad desperately wanted to keep trying for their little girl.
And they got me.
I wasn't the little girl my parents had dreamed about. I wasn't the pretty, small, or quiet girl the world had told them to look forward to as they dreamed of having a daughter.
I have never been quiet. I grew up trying to fit in with my two older brothers and stand out in a family of opinionated and outspoken people, in a world that I wanted to take in and talk about and "say my piece" when something confused or bothered me. Quiet was just not something that ever felt feasible for me to be.
I was only small for a short time, and the feelings of fear and shame about growing out as I grew up are the foundation of some of my earliest and most ingrained self-perceptions from my childhood.
And pretty. Oh, pretty. I am and have always been a beautiful person. But pretty is a thing I've rarely ever been or felt without that dreaded qualification: You're pretty for a big girl.
Quiet and small and pretty (we’ll hold “girl” for another time). Those are characteristics that have always existed outside of my experience. And now I realize that so much of the emotional baggage I've carried around throughout my life is full of the weight of being outside the norm of what the world expected of me. The weight of trying to find ways to be valued, to be worthy of positive attention and affirmation, but really to be worthy of love and belonging.
Thumbnail photo of the author, age 6 (from family archive)
