Maybe it’s only embarrassing to be a girl, I thought, if you’re stupid — if you confirm the stereotype instead of subvert it. And maybe it’s only boring to be smart if you’re a boy ( or , I might have thought privately, in the worst recesses of my mind, ugly ).1

We don’t get to choose our obsessions, and really, who says that thinking about Shakespeare or botany or quantum physics is more valuable than thinking about what it means to live in a body.

It’s become a kind of cultural dogma that any resistance to one’s own girlishness must be symptomatic of a deep internalized misogyny — and this idea is often subtly accompanied by the tricky rhetorical trad-ism that girls aren’t worse , just different , and that it shouldn’t be a problem to say so unless you think girl stuff is bad.

Reading my journal from the day before always feels like reading the ramblings of a total psychopath, getting so worked up over nothing, these daily fits of exaggerated joy and melancholy, this contrived wonderment, the lungs must just ache from their perpetual gasping, Christ; but then I of course descend back into those same hysterics as the day... See more

I have to realize the street gives me back a primitive reflection of whatever load of hope or fear I am carrying about with me that day , Gornick continues, making me wonder about what loads I might be carrying.

It’s so weird , I text my friend, presumptively, to watch a stranger have what will obviously be one of the singular most beautiful moments of their entire life . I love the city for this, most of the time, for its vast de-privatization of sentiment — I like bearing witness to the best and worst of other people, and I like the knowledge that I am... See more