I remember the moment I realized that I wasn’t like the other girls.

It was the summer before my sophomore year of high school.  I had been chosen by powers unknown at my school to attend a leadership forum at a local university. 

In hindsight, that’s one of many things that I have mixed feelings about.  I’m so grateful for every opportunity I received and for every time a teacher or adult voted in my confidence.  But I wonder how much difference some of those opportunities might have made for a kid who never got picked. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve them or want them, I just wonder is all.

Well. It’s in the past and spilled milk and all that, so I won’t camp out there today.

I knew no one else attending the event, and my roommate was someone I had never met. I don’t remember her name or where she was from, but I remember she had these piercing blue eyes and creamy flawless skin.

Turned out she wore colored contacts and real heavy foundation.  I don’t remember having any makeup with me.  I’m not even sure I took a hair dryer.

The week was a blur of inadequate sleep and scintillating lectures on economics.  Those were kind of hard to stay awake through. I don’t remember any of the faces or people who were there, but I do remember one split second with complete internal clarity.

I was standing – probably make-up free and untamed hair sticking to my sweaty face – in a central courtyard near a fountain in front of the university’s auditorium.  It was evening in the summer, and getting dark.  A group of boys was jumping and splashing in the fountain.  They’d gotten massive water guns from somewhere and were spraying each other. Probably there were threats directed at the group of girls I was standing with, but I don’t remember that either.

I stood at the edge of that group of girls, not excluded but not included, either.  I hung on the periphery, watching the boys play.  And I thought, “I’m like them.  I behave like the boys.  I don’t act like the girls.”

What started as an observation quickly shifted to judgment.

“I’m too loud.  I’m too rowdy.  I don’t wear enough make-up or fix my hair like I should.  I’m wrong.”

Standing on the paved brick path in the middle of a manicured college campus instead of the smooth, cool dirt and patchy grass outside our heavily shaded house way back in the woods, I became aware of how glaringly I did not fit.  Of how wrong I was.

I’m sure that wasn’t the first time I’d felt like I didn’t belong.  In fact, I know it.  I know it just as certainly as I know it wasn’t the last time I’d feel I didn’t belong.

I spent the next twenty-ish years believing that I needed to do a better job of contorting myself to be more appropriate.

To be better at being a girl, at being smart, at being good, worthy, acceptable, and being… well, everything.

One Sunday morning, two kids and a lot of years after that summer night, I scurried through the church building toward our pew with my two little girls and the best husband a girl could ever hope for.  As I saw other people settling in with their families, I thought to myself, “Ya know, if I could just be put-together like that one is, and patient like that one over there, and sweet like that girl, I’d be a pretty good woman.”

I’m not bad with makeup when I wear it, and I get more patient as I get older, but I’ll never be sweet.  It’s not even a goal for me anymore.  Let’s just call that one dead and buried.

I wish I could also remember the moment I realized there’s no such thing as “like the other girls,” but I don’t.  Unfortunately that knowledge was much slower in coming and much less immediately understandable.

Over 30 years after I simultaneously wished I could have a water gun in the fountain AND be more like the pretty girls, I’m finally finding freedom because I don’t feel like I have to be like anyone else.  It doesn’t matter if someone finds me wanting or unacceptable.  I’m just fine.  And I’m just who I’m supposed to be.

I’m understanding that we’re all different and the same.  We’re all complex and glorious products of varied and shared experiences and messages and created personalities.  Whatever we see as “like the other girls” is an illusion created by the most insecure parts of us that always look for ways to prove we’re not good enough.

I had the benefit of being raised with a wonderful attitude toward femininity.  I was taught that I could do what I wanted.  I was never told NOT to be loud or climb trees or build forts or have opinions. I was taught that makeup is fine but so is no makeup. We wore play clothes and work clothes and pretty clothes.  We went barefoot when we wanted and we wore shoes when we should.

I had no brothers, so there was no distinction between “girl chores” and “boy chores.”  I took out trash, helped with laundry, hauled wood, handed over tools and held the flashlight while dad worked on cars, took care of my sisters, and baked.

But there were a lot of things I wasn’t taught.  I wasn’t taught how to make boys like me.  I wasn’t taught how to look at what other people were doing to decide who I should be.  I wasn’t taught that being a girl meant I had to adhere to a certain set of behavioral standards that didn’t apply to boys. 

Except maybe don’t bend over in a skirt.

So I’m still not entirely sure why that night I was so quick to declare myself “wrong” and “other.”  I don’t fully understand it.

What I do know is I don’t want to forget what that felt like.  While I didn’t enjoy it, that memory reminds me to look for the people on the periphery so I can bring them in and make sure they know they belong no matter how we are the same or different.  

It reminds me to be open and vulnerable with my own daughters about what it means to be a woman and the beauty in the variety of ways that’s carried out.

It reminds me to show my son the glory of a strong woman and the tenderness she also possesses.

And it reminds me that comparing myself to others is always a losing game.

So, whether your comparisons have told you that you’re not a good enough parent, woman, man, person… whatever… it’s time to take that authority away from them.  No one gets to tell you who you’re supposed to be.

Go be your wonderful, beautiful, weird self.  That’s the best gift you can give us all.