I struggle with being a girl

by ELEANOR GRENDON

because when I was eleven I found blood in my pants and was scared that the kids at school would find out. I heard them talking about that other girl it happened to and I saw them looking at her small breasts, so I wore large jumpers to cover mine up. I struggle with being a girl because when I was fifteen, my mother told me it was a good thing that I had curves. She said that’s what boys like, as if my body was made to be looked at by anyone but myself. I struggle with being a girl because when I was seventeen, my boyfriend at the time told me that I didn’t have to shave for him. He said that he didn’t care what I looked like and yet he had told me, just two weeks before, that I should start dressing like a girl. I struggle with being a girl because even now, at nineteen, I’m scared of wearing low cut tops in fear of catching the attention of the wrong person, like the Turkish man who took one look at my chest and said very big, very nice. I struggle with being a girl because I’ve cried alone on the toilet, pregnancy test in hand, googling the terms of abortion and wondering if I will ever manage, like my mother said, to get myself onto the right track.

Illustration by Tasha Pick