Age 5. I am told for the first time that I cannot do something because I am a girl.
Age 10. My best friend tells me that some boy asked her if I combed my hair. (I probably didn’t.)
Age 15. I am told I should try wearing makeup.
Age 24. You look better without makeup. (I was wearing makeup.)
Age 25. A man asked me, confused, if girls pissed through their vaginas -- after watching an episode of Orange is the New Black.
Age 26. That same man told me I was hard to love.
Age 26. On my first date out of that relationship, a man spent the first 20 minutes texting his fiancé -- he was polyamorous -- that I was someone he’d met online, and not an old friend, which is what he had told her. Then he mansplained playwriting to me. I am a professional playwright.
Age 26. A man stood me up -- for the second time in a row -- and then I ran into my ex’s mother on the metro platform. She pretended not to cry. I never heard from him again. I went home and cried.
Age 27. A man told me derisively that he associated hairlessness with femininity. I am neither hairless nor particularly feminine. This was before he fucked me, poorly. His cat was cute, though.
Age 27. A man told me with a sigh, after I read him a poem I’d written for him, that I “just wasn’t a back of a Prius girl.”
Age 27. A man on Tinder named Gavin asked me what it was like to look like Sinead O’Connor with AIDS.
What do all these things have in common, though. You might ask. Well.
I listened. I let these words worm their way into my heart and I said nothing. These quotes haunt the marrow of my bones like ghosts. I wish I’d made them up.
And you know what? The hell with that.
Age 28. I started to learn to take up space. To stop allowing people to explain myself to me. I started to step on or through man-spreaders on the metro.
Age 28. I started to share my stories onstage, online, to friends -- and found so many people similarly haunted.
Age 28. Sometimes my muscles remind me to be small again. I hunch my shoulders and stare at my clenched hands in my lap and I ignore the men on the metro who say things to me.
Age 28. I have resting melancholy face.
Age 28. But I wear short skirts and shorts and tight dresses that show off my hourglass figure. I get called Thick Thighs.I get told to smile, baby.
Age 28. I don’t.
Age 28. I took a chance on a young man.
Age 28. He tells me he loves me and he means it, just the way I tell him. We are equal and we listen to each other and we turn on lights for the darkness that we both hide in our hearts.
Age 28. We are not perfect.
Age 28. And that’s okay.
Age 28. I meant for this to be funny.
Age 28. I don’t know how this story ends. But I’ve always been better at beginnings than endings.
