Girl vs. woman

The other day, during a deep, extended text chat with a friend, they casually referred to me as a “woman” in the context of our conversation about culture and behavioral norms. The word instantly registered on my radar as feeling awkward. There’s no logical reason for this. I am a 41-year-old adult who identifies as a cisgender female, so why should there be anything weird, or unusual, or incorrect about someone else describing me as what I am?

And yet…that word felt anything but comfortable. I brushed it off in the moment, but because rumination and I are besties, we got back to overthinking it later.

Woman.

What is a woman?

That’s a loaded question.

Well, what am I?

Not that.

Again, what am I?

I’m a girl.

What’s the difference?

Everything.

—

I was, intentionally or not, brought up to believe that you can’t trust other people or their actions. “It’s not you I’m concerned about,” my mom would remind me, time and time again as she didn’t let me hang out with my high-school friends on a Saturday night. “It’s everyone else that worries me. Who knows what they’ll do?”

I didn’t understand this at the time, of course, but my mom’s likely well-meaning overprotectiveness was doing more than keeping me away from underage drinking or loud house parties. Her constant distrust of the world around her made me distrust myself, too. It made me believe I was naive—that I didn’t have the skills or character to figure out what was safe from what wasn’t. That my instinct and intuition were usually wrong. That people only do nice things when they want something from you. That everyone’s got something to hide. That I needed other people to define guardrails for me, because I didn’t know enough about the world to do it for myself.

At 15, my mom was telling-me-without-telling-me that I wasn’t aware enough, or competent enough, or smart enough, to navigate my own life as a teenager. I was still a girl. And in order to “protect me,” she had to keep it that way.

When I look back at all of this, it’s amazing that she stood behind my choice to travel 2,000 miles away for college just a year later. That’s a paradox I may never understand. And while the distance and freedom I experienced there for the first time changed me in some incredibly profound ways, I still carried my skepticism of other people with me. I yearned to belong, and to be loved, and to experience all-the-things, but I was still just a girl. And I couldn’t be trusted to really know what I wanted, much less to go out into the real world and make it happen.

Fast-forward a few years. I graduated from college at the (under)age of 20, and started my first professional job in advertising three months before my 21st birthday. I was the youngest person in the agency, and the confidence-destroying pattern of other people asking “are you sure you’re old / experienced enough to be here?” would continue for the next 15 years, in one shape or another. Several agencies later, when I turned 30, I was no longer the youngest person on my team—but I was still the youngest Associate Creative Director in the office. At 35, I was the youngest Group Creative Director. At 40, I may not have actually been the youngest person sitting in the World Trade Center boardroom in NYC, judging the Effie Awards Final Round entries (which is a big deal in advertising), but I still felt like the most inexperienced one there. The most naive. The most unworthy of being in the same space with “real” experts. “Real” adults.

—-

There’s a phrase that goes something like, “when people tell you something about yourself often enough, you start to believe it.”

For the first 16 years of my lie I was told, and shown, that I couldn’t hold my own in the world. After all, I was only a girl. I spent three decades trying to prove that lie wrong—getting married (becoming a wife), having kids (becoming a mom), building a successful career (becoming a role model), accumulating all the trappings and accolades of “becoming” more and more and more—and yet, the belief that I was never going to become anything besides girl was still embedded somewhere deep inside me.

That’s where all of my self-analyzation and rumination led me, anyway.

And there was a pretty deep “aha” at the bottom of it. I realized that I was so struck by my friend referring me to me as a woman because at 41, I don’t know if I have never truly seen myself that way. And it was both terrifying, and astonishingly liberating, to find out that someone else does.

This person, without any prompting, told me that they see me as fully-grown, adult human who can make her own choices. Who can forge her own path. Who doesn’t owe anything to anyone, and doesn’t need to rationalize her decisions. As someone who’s collected wisdom and knowledge through experience, and who brings value in sharing it with others. Someone who is comfortable enough in her body to ask for, and go after, what she wants.

That’s what being a woman has always meant to me. Strong, self-assured, comfortable in their own skin, aware of both their gifts and their challenges. But always, in reference to someone else.

I can easily recognize other people, even close friends, as women—but not me. When I look in the mirror, all I ever see is a girl.

My friend sees something different, though. Something maybe, finally, more true.

—

I looked in the mirror for a long time that night after our text exchange, after going down all sorts of twisting, winding paths of introspection and overthinking. I wanted to try and find at least a glimmer of what my friend saw, something more grown-up, more real in my reflection. Something that would make me believe that I wasn’t just being naive again.

I stared at my eyes gazing back at me, eyes that have witnessed 41 years’ worth of happiness and heartbreak. Beautiful joys, and agonizing deaths.

I felt the skin on my face, softer and squishier than it used to be, with a few more fine lines creeping in every year, and a few more stories to tell, too.

I pressed my lips together, the ones that have kissed my husband with passion, and kissed my kids with tenderness…and are still curious to see what else they can taste.

I watched as I moved my hands move slowly down my chin, to my neck, to my shoulders, to my collarbone, to the top of my chest. I felt the terrain of my skin, the pattern of my breath — and just for a second, acknowledged that they know more about life than I give them credit for.

Who I saw in the mirror that night was still me, but maybe a different version than I was used to finding there. The girl wasn’t gone, but I could very clearly feel the woman stepping out from behind the shadows. She was mapping herself. Trying to understand where she came from. Working up the courage to step into the spaces that had only been occupied by self-doubt for so long.

This unfamiliar side of me, this woman, she still needs some help finding her footing. But, at least for now, she’s not going to wait for someone to surprise her with a word or a comment to inspire her to get curious. She’s going to try ask for what she wants. For what she needs. She’s going to find a way to discover all the multitudes she doesn’t even know exist inside her yet.

I can’t wait to get to know her better along the way.