It's hard to be friends with people in general, and I've learned it is even harder to navigate relationships with other women. I know the value of these relationships and am working on exploring how to enhance them, instead of avoiding and disengaging from them.
Coming from a Catholic background, I am taught to love everyone wholeheartedly and support unconditionally. Now, being a Senior at an all-girls Catholic high school, I, along with my peers, am pushed to do even more than that. As a Mc****y girl, we are told to pursue feminism with a high head and push ourselves past the limits of society. We are also told that we will have continued support in our choices and will be loved by our peers for being ourselves. I like that. But, I know now that this is not always the case.
In discussing my personal essay, I was told to somehow relate to the reader who I am in a few hundred words. This is who I am. I am struggling with being a feminist, a friend, maintaining my identity, and trying to juggle my Catholic values of love and unconditional support. High school hasn't been easy but it has made me think deeply, made me persistent, and has taught me how to struggle gracefully.
In all honesty, I am not the person to randomly walk up and ask someone to be my friend. I am introverted, sometimes I cannot even talk to my own friends, which is why I was so extremely glad to finally find a solid group of girls that I could actually speak and be heard with. This group of girls had many problems, always struggling with family life, making friends, mental health, grades, and suddenly I was not the one struggling to succeed anymore. I was a supporter, the homework tutor, the mediator, and most definitely the therapist.
Through my first 2.5 years of high school, I dealt with everyone's problems and forgot about fully caring for myself. This meant taking time out of my day to recharge from social interaction. Not only was I being used for personal gain, I had so many things taken from me: my best friend since freshman year, my boyfriend of exactly one year (he dumped me for the other girl), and the only people I talked to (they dumped me too). Now, although the whole story is long, tedious, and might even be seen as cliche, I learned that these relationships and my reactions to them taught me more about myself. I was not confident. A feminist that is not confident? A feminist that struggled to be friends with other girls? This wasn't working.
That's when a mentor heard my story and pointed me in the direction of "Bad Feminist" by Roxane Gay. Her writing was honest and spoke to me in a way no one at Mc****y was willing to. She mixed the bad with the good and was honest. She wrote, "My mother's favorite saying is "Qui se ressemble s'assemble." Whenever she didn't approve of whom I was spending time with, she'd say this ominously. It means, essentially, you are whom you surround yourself with." Now, although my mom never had these fine words of wisdom, she did see the negative changes in me when I was struggling to understand myself and how I fit in. It's true. I might be a "bad feminist" too, but at least I'm willing to work on it, learn from my mistakes and truly try to find how I fit into feminism.
I was warned not to write about relationships and to focus on all the positives in my life. But, that's not feminism. That's not who I am. I know that I can learn, I can realize when I'm wrong, and I like being presented with other perspectives.
YOU ARE READING
This I Believe
PoetryI began this project in my AP American History class called 'This I Believe'. The project was from some 1950's radio thing, I really don't know or care honestly... I do, however, feel like it's a good book idea and needs to be further explored and e...
