#30: Guts, Girlhood, and Grey Hair

on living the romcom dream of your twenties

Dear reader,

Every week I share a link where you can donate funds to a good cause.
I am not affiliated with any of these organisations, I’d just like to give a few lines of space to efforts that deserve attention.
This week, Shamsaha is a space advocating for women’s empowerment and protection in the Middle East. You can sponsor food, medicine, shelter or someone’s escape from an abusive home here.

After my Writer’s Meet this month, I ended up in a conversation about girlhood and instinct and female powers. The only reason I contributed anything of value was because I’d had a very strong cup of coffee, and the words wouldn’t stop coming out of my mouth. So I found myself blurting out unfiltered thoughts to some of the most gorgeous, intelligent and kind women at this little meet up. And this unfiltered thought was:

“Girlhood is like being part of the Winx Club.”

Basically, I compared the historically-fraught-with-struggle lifestyle of women to fairy teenagers on Cartoon Network. 

In some ways I stand by my point, in the sense that you become a woman when you suddenly earn superpowers.
However, even that language is flawed, because where men have instinct - something bold and raw and wild - women possess a paranormal knowing. Intuition is a strictly female thing, and portrayed to be clouded in mystery. When guys have instinct, they’re macho and rooted in some old way of being. Women in their knowing are haunted, ghostly. The fact of the matter is that our instincts are just incredibly accurate, due in part to our wily ways of surviving a patriarchal society. 

The amazing thing about our gut is that it’s always right.
Coincidentally that’s also its worst feature.

Especially when you don’t listen to your intuition on the night a beautiful boy asks you to dinner. 

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

The shittiest thing about a breakup you didn’t see coming is that you can’t blame anything but your own stupidity. You were pretty sure things were going great when they obviously weren’t, so clearly your sense of judgment is poor and your trust is unnecessarily high. Something about having trust and expecting open communication from men in today’s world is….childish. Naive. Stupid. Like you’d have to literally be an idiot to expect a full grown man to be capable of navigating personal relationships. 

You spend your entire childhood being trained on how to be as lovable as a puppy (and not as a person), move into your adolescence figuring out the difference between being cute and being hot, and then in your mid-twenties you get dumped by a guy who practically proposed to you five days earlier. 

And there is no one at fault but you - for betraying your gut instinct and accepting a first date, for keeping your mouth shut when the red flags grew ever more scarlet, for still pleading when he offered to buy you sympathy French fries after breaking up with you.

The whole time, your Gut is singing:
🎵 i told you so i told you so i told you so 🎵

and then ends with:
by the way, he’s cheating on you. for sure. 

You know you can’t even ignore her because she’s most likely right (she’s totally right) and you deserve a whole lot better anyway, but does that ‘better’ even exist in the first place?
Will your high standards accelerate your path to senior spinsterhood and therefore doom? What the heck will I do being single at the age of 65? I mean sure, married people are always gloating about their partners in the first three years of their marriage and trying to kill each other for the next thirty, but hey, isn’t that the golden promise of a “Full Life”? To fall into a trap and then spend the rest of your life wondering why on earth you gave into it? Have children you will mentally scar and then push them into the same cycle?

Maybe not. Maybe all men are boring and antiquated and confuse love for control. Maybe everyone is a gaslighter and all you do is people please - but one day your voice will not shake when you set a boundary, and you will leave at the first hint of red, and never respond and be the ruthless war general at home and at work and presumably everywhere else. Maybe you’ll become a b-word and it will be the most liberating thing you will ever do. Travel the world and wear mismatched shoes and keep your kindest words for the other girls in the club ladies’ room. 

Maybe you will be shrewd and political and have a very long hair growing out of your chin and you will like it. Maybe the men will keep coming around, like they always do, and you become an expert at noticing when a wedding ring has been casually slipped off their finger and you will shoo them away.

Or maybe your silver haired financebro Romeo will text out of the blue and say he is so sorry, he made the biggest mistake of his life, would you please give him another chance. And you will say yes and play hard to get until one day things are right again, there is a big fat ring on your finger and his mother doesn’t have weird preconceived notions about you. Then you will hop skip and jump down the street to pick a home of your own, pop out four kids, and celebrate your 50th anniversary, still in love and full of careful consideration of each others’ opinions. 

But my gut instinct tells me I’ll probably be in the first camp. 

Love and guts,

Kaav.