When I was little, I didn’t always like being a girl.

Not in a hateful way, or a depressed way. I just have an older brother, and he’s really cool, so I used to think that boys were just so much cooler than girls. Boys had things easier and could do things faster, and that was what I wanted to be like.

I remember one time I was dragged along to Costco by my mom. Being homeschooled is like that—you end up everywhere other than home, and grocery shopping is the most common field trip. I was ten, maybe. Give or take a few years. I was wandering through the clothing section with my brother, sneakers squeaking against that shiny gray concrete floor.

And one table had these shorts.

Black shorts, with a sort of black-and-gray hatches on them. Boys’ shorts. The pant legs went down to about the knees—and the pockets! I could fit my whole hand in them—and then some! I turned to my brother and told him that he absolutely had to get them. These were good shorts.

My brother wanted nothing to do with the shorts. He didn’t need shorts, he said. He had shorts.

Now, I didn’t have shorts. Not good shorts. All the girls’ shorts at, like, Target and Old Navy were super duper short—and they were pink, or sparkly, or said stupid things on them like dream or girl power. And don’t get me started on the pocket space. How was I supposed to collect snail shells and rocks at the park in the summer if I didn’t have more than a fingertip of pocket space? Girl clothes were stupid. Girl clothes didn’t care about tomboys and so they didn’t care about me.

I looked back at the shorts in my hands. I held them up a little higher by the waistband. I could fit in these shorts—they had an adjustable waistband, after all, with the elastics and the buttons. Black goes with everything. Not like pink and purple and rainbow-snow-cone. Black went with my Clone Wars shirt and all my other hand-me-downs. Black even goes with girlier clothes.

I begged my mom for the shorts—she didn’t care. I did need shorts.

And I wore those shorts everywhere. They were probably the most comfortable pair of shorts I’ve ever had. I was so sad when I outgrew them.

Paper telescope…

As time went on, I grew up. That’s how time works. I grew up and I didn’t mind so much that I was a girl. There were so many cool girls, you know. Princess Leia. Marion Ravenwood. Katara, Kyoshi, Toph. Cinderella and Rapunzel—Natasha Romanov and She-Hulk (this was way before the show, mind you) and Scarlet Witch. I went to a party dressed like Wanda, actually. Stole my brother’s leather jacket that he’d painted red for his Starlord costume. I did the accent all night. In my defense, it was a costume party.

But really, it’s not like all those characters convinced me that being a girl was cool—or even that they made me realize that I did, in fact, like being a girl. It’s not like I’d actually wanted to be a boy, I just liked to pretend. And it’s not like I actually hated being a girl, I just didn’t know how to be a girl. Because it was my first time being alive—how does anybody know what to do their first time being alive?

I don’t really know how to put it.

Just that I got less disappointed, I guess, that I wasn’t a boy. And I got excited that I was a girl.

But one day I was sitting on my living room floor—about fourteen years old, maybe—and I was making a tiny paper telescope. It was for my dolls, for Christmas. One of them was an astronomer, you see—way ahead of his time, too. Being a scientist in medieval fantasy times isn’t for the faint of heart, so I thought he deserved a telescope.

I was watching a tutorial on YouTube. I was rolling the craft paper into different-sized tubes, and it was fighting me. I couldn’t get them to stay. Heat rose in my chest. I remembered I had to do my laundry and it made me want to cry—and my stomach was cramping, so I couldn’t focus, so the paper kept slipping out of my hands. It’s not that hard to make a telescope out of paper—I’ve made harder crafts, why can’t I do this? And I had a craving for sparkling seltzer, which I hated, but I wanted a can so so badly that I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. And so that also made me want to cry. Tears pricked my eyes as I sat on the hardwood, leaning back on my hands. It’s stupid that I wanted to cry—I’m stupid, and this is lame, and I can’t wait for this week to be over.

And so from a high-up high, I was dragged to a low-down low. My excitement at everything was dashed and I just wanted to be normal again. One minute I can do any craft and run around my house, sliding in my socks, and be a bundle of joy who’s too busy to talk because she’s writing stories in her head. One minute I’m happy and excited about a fun little project. The next I’m crying on the floor about paper and laundry.

Girl power…?

I love the days when I love being a girl. Because loving being a girl doesn’t mean that you hate boys for being boys. (And I know that’s a controversial phrase now—”boys will be boys.” But I mean it literally. Though, maybe even that is controversial…)

I think without realizing it, I’m always looking for something to make me remember how fun it is to be a girl. Or, at least, how it feels. The older I’ve gotten, the more it seems like the internet really doesn’t care. Like a good creature, it pretends to care. But it’s exhausting to sort through.

And I’ll sit on my floral green couch, swiping through reels and ads, and it seems like every new movie about “girl power” is disgustingly shallow and, well, disgusting.

In my short life, “girl power” has become one of my most hated phrases.

In my short life, I’ve watched “girl power” become a hideous, ugly thing, especially how it’s portrayed in television.

It became about women being allowed to have as much sex as they want, with whoever, whenever. Is that empowering? Does that make a fifteen-year-old kid feel valuable and safe? How is that helping women?

It became about showing that when some women do evil things, it’s fine because they’re women. It’s empowering. It’s justified.

It became about hating men. About hating women who don’t agree with other women. About hating women who don’t hate men.

It became about having the right to kill unborn children.

It became a muddy mess with jagged edges.

If girl power was like this when I was a little girl, I probably would’ve genuinely wanted to be a boy. And maybe it was that way, and I just took too long to notice.

Either way, I’m sick of it. I’ve been craving stories that show “girl power” as something positive. As something soft, and solid, and real—sometimes painful, or brutal, but honest and singular. Not about dragging down other women, or belittling men, or even really making an external statement on life or the world. At the end of the day, girl power seems like an internal thing to me. It’s about experience, both individual and universal. And maybe that sounds cheesy, or silly, but it’s so absent from modern anything that it feels so special to me.

The girlhood that shows wanting to own a pair of boys’ shorts because of the color, the length, and the pocket space.

The girlhood that shows the mood swings. The mess. The different meanings of femininity, which all fall under the same umbrella.

Real and raw. Not sexual—not even romantic. I love romance but you don’t need that to define what it is to be a girl.

Just life. The way it is, without all the sludge.

Supergirl!

I went and saw Supergirl over summer break. I didn’t expect anything from this movie. I’d loved the Superman movie, but I wasn’t sure about this one. It’s about a girl, and I’d been disappointed too many times to get my hopes up. I didn’t even have the energy to get my hopes down. I was ambivalent at best. Perhaps even apathetic.

But my friend Jenna found herself with twelve free tickets to the movie, so our friend Alli wrangled together a massive group. All my Cambridge friends, pretty much. We took up a whole row except for four seats.

Even as I stood in the concessions line, I didn’t know what to expect. I paid my, like, eight dollars for my small cherry ICEE. (Red ICEE is mandatory whenever I go to the movie theater. I don’t really have popcorn—ICEEs are where it’s at.) And I led the charge into the theater—all twelve of us, filing in like little lemmings into the row right behind the handicap seats—best seats in the house, since you can put your feet up on the railings.

Alli and I shared glances as the trailers played—she laughed at the Minions movie trailer so hard that she didn’t notice the movie had started.

Immediately, I was hooked.

The colors.

The framing.

The sets and costumes. The music!

It had a vintage feel—like a vintage alien adventure movie, or an episode of classic Trek or Who.

And I could go on and on and on about the themes of this movie. How it showed that nice doesn’t mean good–that true kindness comes from doing what’s right, not pulling punches. How you have to be a doer of the word, not just a hearer—how revenge is the Lord’s, and how for others, living out your life is the best revenge. How sometimes—many times—the chaos is so loud and overwhelming that all you can do is rush into the presence of the one that sustains you.

It was funny without really trying to be funny. It was subtle, and patient. It took its time. It showed you long shots, quiet emotions, internal hurt. And it paired all of that with awesome fight scenes! It was balanced and emotional, and completely engaging from start to finish.

It’d been a long time since I’d seen a movie like that. It was honestly everything I’d been missing from modern cinema.

But above all, it showed so well the girlhood experience—and really without saying it. It showed the whiplash from high to low. It showed the strength and the weakness.

And it wasn’t romantic. No subplot—it wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t that kind of story.

It showed a different kind of love. The care for someone smaller and younger and more innocent than yourself—someone who’s in danger of walking down a path you know will lead to ruin. Someone to guide. Someone who represents everything you wish you still were, and maybe could be one day.

Kara and Ruthye had a great dynamic. They just…

Ugh. I love this movie. Not only was it beautiful in its physical design, and brilliant in its pacing, and vintage in its feel, but it didn’t really feel like it had an agenda. Except, I guess, to show that sex trafficking is wrong. Which it is.

Supergirl made me feel like girl power doesn’t have to stay such a dirty phrase.

It made that little ten-year-old Lucy with the pair of boys’ shorts smile.

So much hate…

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