trying to be someone i’m not.

Another version of myself lives in a series of pink journals. She never existed in the flesh, and I spent years of my life torturing myself for not embodying her and living her fate.

I unwrapped my pastel pink Moleskin journal, reunited with the familiar scent of untouched paper and the stomach dropping sensation of silent surrender, knowing that, as every time before, everything I wrote down in it would never be manifested into reality. After a brief session of reassurance, I inked the pages with resolutions and affirmations. I saw the spirit of my younger self within, immediately recalling my first self-improvement diary I created the summer before sixth grade. Except this time, I was not a twelve year old girl hoping to become a woman before entering a new school. I was sixteen, riddled with the anxiety of failing to become a woman throughout my teenagehood. 

I learned all too quickly that the pressure of becoming a woman, in essence, was the pressure to achieve perfection. “Glow up” journals became my mode of transformation at all too young of an age. What could a twelve year old understand about the ideal woman? 

Throughout my life, the ideal woman was defined to me as the woman that pleases everyone. My grandfather watched fashion shows and reminded me that focusing on my beauty should remain my lifelong goal. My mother rejected my love for painting and writing and Broadway musicals because the ideal woman is one with a career in science and math, one who makes lots of money and would never depend on anyone else. So, I clung tightly to these “glow up” journals throughout my adolescence, grasping for something to ground me in the possibility that one day, I would be perfect. From extreme water diets to sleeping with clothespins on my nose to signing up for every challenging science course possible, I tried everything, and subsequently, I crumbled at the understanding that I was not strong enough to be her. More so, it was sheer inability to do so that defined me. It was because the story told in my collection of pink journals never has an ending. They’re all half filled, with the remainder of the pages left blank, often crumpled with age.

While her identity never defined me, it led me to discover my own. I began to find peace with myself, not through an extreme transformation, but through self-discovery. Through an indulgence in the humanities, through experimentation in art, through writing for hours on end, through conversation. 

I see myself in the lives of women everywhere. I see the struggle to not only live in an expectational image, but the perfect image. In the women of the Gilded Age, seeking adventure and independence that remained ungranted, in the women in Afghanistan, desiring the education to learn and to influence, in the little girls, fearing the effects of age and food in hopes of achieving beauty. It is a universal pain, a universal battle. In different forms, the expectation of perfection from women remains unchanged. 

The girl in the pink journals never existed. Yet, she is one of the most important aspects of my identity. She is the reason for my years of hurt, but she is also the beginning of a lifetime of discovery, happiness, and influence.