You are a nowhere girl
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There comes a time in a woman’s life she no longer gets asked what she wants to be when she grows up. She is grown, equipped with executive power and monetization options. She can slice her face open if she wants to, get it stitched back up, fall in and out of love, be misunderstood, yell in the streets, change her mind, lawyer up for a good fight.
She entertains herself with various affinities: for men, for her career, for consumption. Her desire is a management problem. Her body is a vacant rented property, a concession, which explains the hatred she’s always had for it. It’s hard to love something in sterile conditions. She’s been shown, repeatedly, that before she is a woman, she is a performer, a worker, and a commodity, virtuously excelling in those domains of course, and though she’s trying to feel liberated, she never agreed to outsourced intimacy and pay-to-play self-worth. She finds herself duped by the discrepancy between what she’s been wanting and what she’d been told to want, and there’s no way to reverse engineer.
She is an everywhere girl: successful, stoic, beautiful, and she continues. She knows the power of restraint, smart propositions, and just how deep and dangerous female envy runs. Her everyday life is transparent. She feels the depreciation of her outer shell in real time, the devastating power loss of everything that is a milestone/setback double-edged sword: investment in her hair, face, body, memberships that trap her in, family, partner, the career ladder, all things deemed good and noble. Everything’s a big achievement, so how come everything’s a big mistake, a minute away from catastrophe? There’s so much loneliness in agency, and she knows this. Sometimes, when no one’s looking, she longs for her own helplessness, to be freed from choice, for somebody to tell her what to do, to give instructions and pointers in a leaflet.
She cannot stop because it’s all she’s known. She’s been deprived of the right background and pushed into survival, and, surely, has seen both edges of the world, the greedy and the generous, so now she takes advantage where she can. And she’s angry, so angry all the time, wondering if more anger will finally turn the wheel of fortune her way or just result in chronically high cortisol. All she needs is sovereignty, peace of mind, to be less of a product, and a lifetime supply of chocolate mousse from Chez Janou.
What she doesn’t know is that she’s just as much of a nowhere girl, no prospects, no tomorrow, chaos brewing underneath. It’s not a split personality disorder but a matryoshka doll: an everywhere girl gets slivered down the middle, snapped in half, and the nowhere girl is waiting her turn to burst through, to be surgically extracted, caesareaned even, so that she can run free. Cursed by the complexity of her afflictive, understructured life, the nowhere girl is inside each one of us, and if we try too hard to conceal and reject her, to keep her dormant, we fail. A woman that wants it easy ends up taking it the hardest.
The staircase paradox in geometry, a pathological example showing that limits of curves do not always preserve their length, teaches us that our perception only goes so far. We see ourselves as everywhere girls — sure we do, it’s needed for our personhood. It’s methodical. A woman can be many things, but she can never be a mess. And if she is, it must at least be partially intentional and curated, with a face card or endless charm to back it up. But the stories we tell ourselves don’t outweigh reality. I felt my whole life, the whole staircase, I’ve been winging it, pushing the nowhere girl further down my throat, setting her back just so she doesn’t show up in the mirror one day, writhing in knowledge, demanding a seat at the table. But she’s so good, almost too good, at tracing my steps.
The nowhere girl is a polar figure, contradictory with ease. She runs fast but barely catches up to the world. She’s a genius and a failure. She makes decisions, weighs them out, then acts on impulse, ruins everything, cries when she’s done bad. She’s been betrayed by the very system that promised her an eternity of belonging, by self-productization that wasn’t of any relief, by rationalizing everything hurtful that’s been done to her, and yet she writes by hand in cursive and sends big, explosive texts, picks people up from the airport, bakes birthday cakes, and stands on the train platform with so much hope, even at life’s most thankless, holding equal room for pain and revelations. Feeling is her prowess. We need the nowhere girl like a hot shower to wash off an ugly day.
My theory is, we can’t find ourselves until we reconcile with the nowhere girl inside us, welcome her, and make her tea. We can sit down and have a little laugh at the woman’s tragedy of being everything for everyone and everywhere. ‘Honey, that was worth giving up on long time ago,’ she’ll say. We’ll be surprised by how fun she can be, how undeterred, unstoppable in failure. She will be grateful then, and she might finally let us sleep through the night.
