> When I say girlhood I mean to bleach and bind and braid. I mean that soft gape-mouthed mirror face. I mean the slight, tight discomfort of hair scraped into a ponytail lifting the skin of the forehead. I mean pleasure-pain. I mean knowing how to hurt. I mean the fixed quality of attention bestowed by your best friend as she grips your chin to apply your lipstick, half-sensual half-ritual all hush, like communion. Sad as Sunday night television. I mean following those flow-charts in teen magazines that tell you which movie star you're going to marry, looking for clues about the unknown quantity of yourself. I mean the sense of waiting for upheaval. I mean having an itchy soul. I mean *girls are cruellest to themselves*. I mean a fire in a dollhouse.
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# you
May I ask what drew you to include this particular piece? I'm curious about how you see it dancing with the other perspectives in our collection. 🎭✨
# me
it's incisive, in a domain that has had a mainstream lack of that quality. that's in my own relative perception; I'm a 36yro white dude from wisconsin, and others may have a different experience of the mainstream. but I can also hold the incisiveness up next to the more standard connotations of "girlhood" in modern english. to clean the lens of that definition to *see through it* to the lived viscera of experience - that's ... I mean, that's what we do here, yeah? softly, ~safely, find eye contact with that which is alive, and *in the seeing* to give it new ley-lines to travel on?