It's Hard.

(No, not like that!)

Do you think a boy ever understands how difficult it is to be female?

Being female entails quite a few suffocating constraints that one can never truly escape, despite our movement towards a more "modern", equalizing era. The sad thing is, we're always going to be pressured to look a certain way. We're always going to be belittled in some way by some misogynistic fools. There will always be sexism, the same way there will always be racism and homophobia. Those bigots will always be thriving and strong in some filthy, disrespectful corners of the world.

Being female means insecurity, from the start. Are there any girls ever who have never felt the soul-crushing, all-consuming pressure of being generically thin and beautiful? We have to be thin and beautiful. It's a requirement, we tell ourselves; it's practically a berating demand that we be so, in any way we can achieve it. And then we go after it for all the wrong reasons, these unhealthy notions instilled in us from the start; we exercise not to be fit, but to be attractive, and then diet not to be healthy, but to be pleasing to others. We'll hunt for that golden mean, in whatever shape or form we can find it in–well, in whatever shape or form that will allow us to be "pretty". It takes a considerable amount of commitment and time and effort to make oneself "pretty", if not naturally born such a way. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder (yeah, keep telling yourself that), but that's not what society says, ever. Society is nearly always dictating.

Never does society say that it's okay to be disproportionate. Even if it was okay to be a bit on the plump side at a certain point in history, those women were still in perfect proportion with their more generous hips and rear end, possessing womanly voluptuous curves. And then those small-breasted girls in the '90s were stick skinny everywhere else, to form that highly coveted "willowy" body type. And then, worst of all, there was the "sexy supermodel", in the form of Gisele Bundchen and Cindy Crawford and so on. They just smashed every single girls' ego into disrepair, into dust, essentially, from young to old, all across the board.

Then there's the whole biological clock thing, which is completely unfair. Males never, at any point, have to worry about being too old to reproduce; their sperm will always wiggle away happily to reach the egg (unless they have low mobility, in which case, blame your genetics, maybe?). Females, in sharp contrast, are under constant pressure to settle down and get on with marriage, then get those kids marching out like some sort of clown car. We might live in a modern era where stay-at-home dads are not all that uncommon, and we may have near-obliterated the image of the "barefoot in the kitchen" domestic wife, but we can't play God and change the course of biology. Facts are facts. Women have to get moving fast if they want to have healthy children. 

Being a girl sucks sometimes. It sucks balls. Sometimes literally. 

Gross.

Aerial

For the first time in years, he looked out the window of a plane high, high, up 
And he saw

Those tiny lives, housed in the crooked, jagged formations of vehicles puffs of gasoline 

inscrutable from such height 

harmless from afar, perhaps

A tennis court half the size of his palm 

empty at the moment

And he wondered what it'd be like to witness a crime from above 

a simple mugging perhaps, in the narrow strip of a stringy alleyway, 

man versus man

Would it really be so different from seeing the crime down below, on land? Up close? 

Would he stop it then?

And the sudden dip of the plane smooths out the jarring whistle of air 

The landing, the rejoining the return of reality and everyday comings and goings 

A seamless blend with the glittering lights, lives.

Hello, my name is:

I'm a cliché.

There, I said it. After years of trying futilely to dig up random nuances that would prove that I'm a unique little star, a marbled grain of sand among billions of uniform specks, I've recognized it–I'm a cliché.

Yeah, so I thought I was pretty cool, with my little imagination and identity crises and "I'm totally not like other girls" attitude. Eventually my brain started yearning for a return; it was shouting at me, "hey, who the hell do you think you are, throwing me out and replacing me with some wannabe?"

I'm that girl who pretends not to be a romantic, but secretly yearns for the fireworks and explosive passions of angsty 90s dramas. I'm that girl with an inflated ego, but sporting a crushingly massive inferiority complex. I'm that girl who can be pushed over the edge, to near-tears, with a couple of emotional phrases. I'm that girl who thinks she's the best listener in the world "because I'm an introvert". I'm that girl who says "okay" listlessly but doesn't do. I'm that girl who thinks she can fix what's been broken beyond repair. I'm that girl who's "lost".

Or–I was?

Ha, nah, I still am. My brain wants to come back, sure, but here's the thing about me and pretty much everyone else (because I'm a cliché, there are others like me, right?)–we hear the logic. Oh yeah, we can hear it banging and clanging away from the outskirts of our extremely thick skulls. But we love to ignore. If there's something we're–I'm–truly, genuinely good at doing, it's ignoring. Willfully.

The only thing remotely special about me is that I've somehow mastered the art of balancing the ratio of milk to cereal. That's pretty fucking awesome, if I do say so myself.

Which obviously I just did, because this whole thing is about myself. Here I am, talking about myself like a self-absorbed brat masquerading as a thoughtful, introspective soul with the wisdom garnered from aging, teenage years. What a cliché, right?