Adama Sawadogo

How to Be a Woman

Trinity Lerum

Be put in dresses while you’re too small to choose. Pick anything that has stripes when you can choose.

Grow up playing with Legos and Littlest Pet Shop. Play with stuffed animals with your twin and make up stories about carnivores at war with herbivores where the animals talk and kill each other and plot revenge and poison their enemies and make orphans. Read book after book after book—books about male main characters following the footsteps of Greek myths, standing against those who say unjust and untrue things, saving the world time and again. The women go crazy. The girls fall in love. These are your favorite stories. Try to make the female characters your favorites but fail. The male characters get to hold swords and kill monsters. Get made fun of for these interests. Your parents tease you when you like a band of all boys. Your mother scoffs when you play video games for too long. Your father rolls his eyes when you sing along to a musical.

Make up crushes on boys because you’re supposed to. In first grade, you’ll decide to like a boy named Oliver, but when you’re building a snow fort at recess, he’ll push you, so pick another. Pick the next boy you see. All through elementary school, you’ll date him, but you don’t talk to him. It’s okay. You stopped thinking he was interesting in second grade. Forget you’re supposed to have crushes on boys until seventh grade. By now, you’ve realized you’re supposed to feel something inside, not just pick. The new boy who is funny and nice makes you smile, so guess that you have a crush on him.

Chop your hair off. Everyone will say something about it. Your head feels lighter.

Kiss a girl in eighth grade. She says she feels fireworks when you lean in behind the library on a Wednesday after school, and you take her word for it. She’s your best friend. Date her. In freshman year of high school, believe there is something wrong with you for never having a favorite female character. Go to see the new Star Wars with your girlfriend and like it. The two of you will break up with each

other soon, and you’ll still be friends. Like it that way just as much as you liked dating. Get made fun of for a week alongside every other girl who hasn’t seen the original Star Wars movies but saw the new one.

Watch makeup videos on YouTube and obsess over how to do it perfectly before you try it yourself. Try it yourself. Buy green concealer to hide redness, then put on blush. Use mascara even though you can’t tell the difference with or without it—it doesn’t matter, put it on. Pretty girls put it on. Every girl that’s worth anything in those books you used to read was pretty. Sometimes they were strong, sometimes weak, sometimes brave, sometimes scared, but always pretty. Girls are supposed to be pretty. Feel mortified when you have gym class, but you forgot to shave the quarter inch of hair on your calves. Hide your body in baggy clothes.

Get tired of trying to be pretty. Get tired of hating your body. Your mom will laugh when she sees how long your leg hair is. An amateur makeup collection will sit unused in your bathroom cabinet. For a while, you think the solution is wearing a crop top even though you don’t have a flat tummy. Then you wonder why you’re showing skin to the kids you go to high school with. Grow your hair out. Chop it off again. Wonder why you wear feminine clothes to feel pretty when you thought you were over that. Wear men’s shirts because they’re funnier. Wear women’s jeans because they fit better.

Date a girl named Hannah who feels everything you do. Tell her that when you were in middle school, you thought about the same things you think about now, but you forced yourself to forget, and she’ll feel everything you thought you were alone in feeling. When you sit on your couch with her, you’ll sit with her right leg over your thighs like the safety bar on a rollercoaster. It’s nice, but you don’t get to know that for a few years.

Be angry. Be confused. Be protective and loud and annoying and insecure and angry again but quieter this time.