(in the style of “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid)

The first step in accepting your femininity is to reject it. Abhor pink. Abhor girls who wear pink. Cuss incessantly at recess. Nod when your father tells you that girls must be quiet. Ignore him. Tell nobody at school when you get your period. Let the pain in your abdomen sink like a knife and bleed into your brain during advanced algebra where the only other girl scribbles away painlessly until it’s 3pm and you tear out, looking nobody in the eyes until you’re alone in the stall and you look down to change your Ultra-Thin for the first time all day and sob because you’re soaked scarlet and so afraid. Hate your breasts because they poke out from your tops and help your flat-chested classmates poke fun at you. Listen exclusively to 70s classic rock. Buy your unisex Ramones t-shirts two sizes up. Seek the approval of your friend’s fathers and quietly bask in their appreciative nods when you namedrop Steve Howe, Steve Miller, any white Steve with a guitar, cocaine addiction, and half an Atlantic record deal. Get angry and blast that angry music written by men with nothing to be angry about. Cry when you tell your mother that a boy called you a bitch in gym class. Use so much Nair that you burn your twelve-year-old skin. Try harder. Pretend you like cars, engines, black oily things that whir and spin and groan. Pretend you hate chick flicks and flowers. Pretend you prefer moths over butterflies, pretend to sympathize with them because they’re hairy, chubby, clumsy, ugly, pretend you don’t know that you hate moths and you hate yourself. Pretend you’ve never had a crush. Spread your legs wide when you sit down, as if you’re a challenge and not an invitation. Join the jazz band and brag about being the only girl. Destroy boys at arm wrestling. Mock girls who can’t manage a push up on their knees. Give up trying to play soccer when your father tells you that sports aren’t appropriate for girls. Give up trying to date when your father tells you that boys aren’t appropriate for girls. Give up trying to reason when your father tells you to never say that word feminist again. Stop crying. Bottle it up instead and keep it close, hold it in: you are not a woman. You are a human, a human, a human.

The second step in accepting your femininity is to apologize. Lock eyes with the girl across the table when yet another male classmate suggests you forgive Freud for the social ills of his time. Lose your belief in virginity. Read Antigone twice. Join the softball team. Hate that you’re the only girl in the band, because you’re a girl, but you’re not really a girl girl, right? Slowly and stupidly realize that you hate your happy trail because it’s so glaringly unfeminine—then ask yourself who the fuck managed to convince you that your female body is unfeminine. Stop straightening, erasing the dark Armenian curls that cover your body. Stop idolizing men, men who grab female bodies and rape female minds, men who insult and abuse queer women, men who really ain’t shit. Stop apologizing for yourself. Ask yourself how you let yourself date the boy who defended his friend when he called you a stupid feminist cunt. Ask yourself why you haven’t had a real crush since you were twelve years old. Pretend you don’t know that it’s because you beat the love out of yourself. Carry your swollen heart heavy in your chest, hold it in the open palms of your hands, bleed all the love you have to give and can’t receive. Hate yourself for hating women. Fall in love, suddenly and soulfully, with women. Defend women at all costs. Forge bonds like steel with your mother, grandmothers, aunts, sisters. Apologize to all the women you’ve hated, mocked, pitied, disrespected, judged. Remove all male icons from your mind and cleanse their lame, stupid power from your thoughts. Tear open the floodgates and drown in the natural light of your maternal ancestry, of the highland herders, housemaids, physicians who birthed you from tongues bitten and bloody, hand-wove you from cloth soldered with centuries, and kissed you with rose hip and pomegranate lips until you shined. Celebrate women—celebrate your beautiful, perfect female-ness: you are a woman, a woman, a woman. Dig your teeth deep into femininity, tear it apart, swallow it. Spit it out and stomp it deep into mother Earth, water it with your tears, grow it back up from the ground until its branches explode with apples of every color, shape, and size, and invite every woman in the world to climb up and bite.

The third step in accepting your femininity is to absorb. Absorb every definition and let it combust within you. Absorb every slur and let it burn molten down the raw of your throat. Absorb all the love beating between your and your sisters’ steady palms. Erupt.