firecat

I was the one who didn't smile back when the guys smiled at me who I had no interest in, and in the mid-80s, I have to tell you this rebellion of mine was both revolutionary and incomprehensible - thus easily dismissed as me being a mere one-off and/or absolutely off my rocker, crazy-bitch style.

But if the creep in question happened to be white and attractive I was also, if caught in the act, as I once was, chastised for my lack of interest, even at the tender age of, I think it was 15. The guy in question was a creep because he had to be at least 30 and I always looked young for my age. To me there was no way, but to Responsible Adult in charge, I was absolutely nuts for not smiling back. I had to explain after getting chastised and trying to justify it and after minutes of not being able to was summarily dismissed as not fully human (or feminine, I'm really not sure which) for a long time after.

I'm not sure if the point was I was supposed to smile back for the sake of pleasantry and abiding by the ironclad social code of the time, or if it even mattered that doing so might have encouraged said creep to pursue me for a date or at least my phone number or something. I didn't get to much explain or defend how I felt because that was irrational and wrong; what I thought or felt did not matter. The very fact of my existence was utterly dismissable; anything that happened within it, even more so. Just a girl.

So I got to sit around and contemplate why I did not want to smile back, and to accept the diagnosis that it was all in my crazy, unfriendly, clearly paranoid little head.

It's likely I did not stop blaming myself and considering myself an unsaveable lost soul over that one incident for the next 25-30 years of my life. It was probably not intended I feel that way, that I take that moment as a total loss, and the loss as a lesson as to why I would never do the most basic thing I was biologically programmed to do: pass for a normal girl, but then again, nothing was necessarily intended, because nothing I felt mattered.

I like how the women and younger girls are speaking up and speaking out now about all this. It's too late to save the older ones like me who've already been tormented out of their souls choices in how to feel, act and react and what to respond and not respond to, and who to date and not date and how to live or not live life, but it's not too late for them. The very act of their speaking up has begun to free me from my guilt at not being the soft, submissive thing that I had not been from birth and never will be until the day I die, who got molded, ever so persistently, to resemble something she still is not.

I can tell you today I'm glad for every last moment of that and all my similar rebellions. At least owning the memories of them makes me more normal by today's standards, even if my rebellions were staged in another, much more restrictive time that made me a freak by their standards, entirely.