Former Teenage Girls in Conversation
Brooks
When asked if she enjoyed high school, Brooks isn’t sure how to respond, stuttering out “yes,” “no,” and “I don’t know” in quick succession.
Although she’d written these interview questions and asked them for weeks, it seemed that she hadn’t realized how hard they’d be to actually answer. After a long pause, she admits that high school hadn’t been the worst. “High school worked out for me academically,” she explains, “and because I was successful academically, I think that, at the time, I was like, ‘well, everything is fine and I don’t really have any issues.’”
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From a very young age, Brooks had been labeled a “gifted” student. Placed in accelerated courses since the second grade, being the “smart kid” became her identifier at school. She entered adolescence with the expectation that if she just kept her head in the books and out of the high school drama, it would be smooth sailing until graduation: “[My mindset] was very much like, ‘this is something I have to do so that I can get into college.’” While studying wasn’t the only thing she did during her four years at Loy Norrix High School, she reflects that she really pushed herself to get good grades, accumulate extracurriculars, and keep a close eye on her class ranking. By senior year, she was known around school as “the valedictorian,” but the title never amounted to new friends or increased “clout.” “I feel like I wasn’t really present in my high school experience,” she says, admitting that she thought of high school as more of a transitional state than an actual event.
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While this detachment was partially self-inflicted, it is not an uncommon experience for highly ambitious students. In “How Becoming Valedictorian Destroyed a Part of Me,” a 2017 Medium article by a recent high school grad, Megan Lim describes how, by playing it safe and becoming “very ‘well-rounded,’” she lost sight of her passions and squandered the creative opportunities high school afforded her. Another example in the pop culture lexicon is the 2018 film Booksmart, in which Amy and Molly realize that they have wasted their high school careers focusing on academics, and subsequently spend the night before graduation attempting to reclaim the social life they missed out on.
Social isolation, real or imagined, is not uncommon for “gifted” students.
A study entitled “Vulnerabilities of Academically Gifted Students” describes the difficulties academically accelerated students may face with peers: their intellect may ostracize them or make them less socially conscious. The study also cites the “asynchrony” between academically talented students’ minds and their emotional development as a potential weak point for them, stating that, “when combined with their emotional intensity, poor impulse control, emotional outbursts and feelings of self-deprecation and devalued self-esteem can ensue.” Brooks often experienced a disconnect between her more mature, “rational” mind, and her emotional life, which was developing at her peers’ pace. The dichotomy would lead to self-deprecation when she experienced feelings she deemed “immature” or “stupid.” It manifested as the desire to be a carefree teen and a serious student at the same time: “I never wanted to be a cringey teenager who was just pretending to be an adult, but I wanted to experience the kind of emotional intensity that you have when you’re a teenager, while still being put-together, which isn’t possible.”
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Brooks ended up only showing the studious part of her personality at school: “When I was at school, I didn’t say anything to anybody, nobody really knew who I was, I just did my math.” To most of her peers, she was just the valedictorian who was “a little bit of a kiss-ass.” But because she was small in stature and hit puberty late (she refers to her appearance in high school as comparable to that of a ten-year-old boy), she was regarded as more of a precocious child than a scholarly adult. “The identifier I really hated was people thinking that I was just a baby that wasn’t attractive,” she recalls. Entering high school, she had high hopes for her romantic life: “I was like, ‘well everybody’s older now and people can finally see me as a girl… as a human woman who they could maybe date.’”
This yearning for affection and validation led Brooks to “full-send” her romantic feelings.
“If this is something I’m feeling,” she remembers thinking, “I’m not going to let this go to waste—I’m going to drive this thing into the ground.” However, she wasn’t willing to sacrifice her intellectual endeavors to attract the boys she liked, a tactic that seemed necessary at the time. The cognitive dissonance of wanting to be strong and independent while also craving male attention caused her to conform to the trope of the “Cool Girl,” the “Not Like Other Girls” girl, especially after entering a male-dominated friend group in her sophomore year. Oh, other teenage girls shopped at Forever21? Brooks only liked vintage and thrifted clothes. Other girls wanted to go out and do things on the weekends? Brooks was totally happy to sit on the couch and watch her male friends play Grand Theft Auto on a Saturday night. (She wasn’t.)
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As Lauraine Leblanc explores in Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture, identifying with men and male subcultures is one way teenage girls can avoid abandoning the “true self” for social constructs of femininity. However, the result is the same: Brooks was molding her personhood into a shape she thought would be attractive to her male peers, no matter how “un-femme” it seemed. As Crystal Jackson’s Medium article puts it, “We’re defining being a girl or woman as being something less than. We’re saying that femininity means something, and that something is negative. To say that we aren’t like other girls is to throw all the other girls under the bus and then to climb over them to get where we’re going.” To Brooks, the scrawny know-it-all nobody wanted to date, claiming that she “wasn’t like other girls” was less an attempt to climb over her female peers than to get even with them. It was the only way she could think to spin the jealousy and inferiority she felt towards the beautiful girls she saw getting all the attention she wanted.
No, she wasn’t like those other girls, she thought—
she was uglier, more awkward, more annoying, less deserving of love.
While she admits she’d hoped to grow out of this mentality by now, Brooks still feels a little trapped in a negative feedback loop. “There are some holdovers [from adolescence] that are just a part of my personality: weird love stuff and this perpetual inferiority complex,” she muses. Still, even though she is “very much not understanding how love works,” she’s undergone a considerable amount of positive transformation in the years following high school. Music, a passion impared by a negative junior symphony experience during high school, has come back into her life through her college’s pops orchestra, where she plays the oboe. Poetry, an interest she cast aside during adolescence because she considered it a “cringey teenage thing,” has also returned to her life. Since entering college, she has fed her love of the written word through classes, workshops, and an internship at a poetry non-profit. “But joke’s on me because I only write about the stuff that happened when I was a teenager,” she laughs. “So, whoops!”
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That feeling of being stuck in the past translates into Brooks’ message for her teenage self: “It’s okay to let the feelings go… you don’t have to hold onto something so tightly.” She talks about all of the times she felt she had to hang on to feelings for someone that didn’t fit quite right, all because she was afraid of being left loveless. While it’s clear she’s still working on this as an adult, she ends with a sentence she knows her past self needed to hear: “The sooner that you let go of stale feelings, the sooner new feelings can come to you.”