Words

I’m always excited to look around the school library on a Friday morning and always pleased to find such a dazzling display of excellent books. I’m sure my school library wasn’t as well stocked. This one caught my eye today and I read a few pages with joy, delighted that these students get to read the brilliant words of brilliant women.

This joy turned to despair to read a comment from one of our girls at lunch club today when asked to share some post-Christmas news: ‘fat as f**k now’.

The world that young women are growing up in now seems increasingly polarised. On the one hand, they seem surrounded by media coverage of powerful women and feminist successes, bedtime stories about ‘rebel girls’ and a genuine understanding that they can achieve anything that their male peers can. But on the other hand young women are still blighted by the all consuming comparison trap and the endless game of trying to make their bodies fit in with societal norms.

How can this girl, so otherwise strident and self aware, come back to school and worry that she’s now ‘fat as f**k’. (And who am I to comment as I nibble on my carrot and celery sticks for lunch in a bid to rid myself of the Christmas excess).

Maybe I was just done, after a long session or trying to convince another young women that she has value and worth. And how powerless those words seem when the actions of another seemingly robbed her of exactly that.

I read a Twitter thread last week about things that we miss from the time before smart phones. Cue a wave of nostalgia and an immense feeling of gratitude that I am not a young person trying to navigate adolescence in this moment.