I remember being in 7th grade when the term “tryhard” became a popular insult. I remember being taunted in algebra when raising my hand too many times, asking clarifying questions. Or when someone tried too hard in gym class, scoring too many goals. If you wore a dress on a day other than picture day. Or when the popular girls started wearing mascara. “Tryhard” was a term that the boys in my grade loved to throw around. It was never my female peers who said this about one another, but we were the ones who were torn apart because of it. The term was the boy's way of telling us they saw us working too hard, and it needed to stop. They thought we were trying too hard to impress them, when the truth of the matter is, we did these things for ourselves. 

I attended an extremely competitive private preparatory school. People cried if they did not receive an A on their Latin exam and taunted each other if they did not make the science olympiad. While I’ll never know for sure, I feel like most other middle schoolers were not this obsessed with their academic performances and instead focused on their outfits or something more age-appropriate. Even though we were extremely encouraged to succeed at high levels, we were penalized when it seemed like we were displaying too much effort. We don’t want to seem like we are working hard, even though we were working ourselves to tears. I still do this now. 

At 20 years old, the “tryhard taunt” that was the soundtrack of my adolescence still plays in my head. It’s cool to be effortless. It’s chic. The “cool girl” aesthetic so many people try to fit into is effortless. You have a loose blowout and slightly frizzy hair, not the neat pin curls of a pageant queen. You have slightly smudged eyeliner instead of a crisp, clean cat eye. As a person who has always been an overachiever and extremely type A, I’ve learned to shrug off the tryhard comments. I never want people to know how hard I am trying to seem perfect. To seem effortless. To seem cool. I’ve rarely, if not ever, felt any of those ways. Nothing has ever come easy to me. I’m a person who has had to work toward every single accomplishment. I’m tired, a lot. I don’t hide my undereye bags, only my accomplishments. If someone brings them up, I shrug them off and turn the conversation elsewhere. I don’t want to dominate the conversation and be a tryhard. 

I’ve never been able to find comfort in the in between. I need a plan, and I need to know what’s happening. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that, as a child, I received an OCD diagnosis, or that I’ve always been extremely vocal about voicing my concerns and questions. I’ve never been okay with uncertainty. While this neurotic behavior has proved helpful in school, I have no shame in asking a teacher a clarifying question or advocating for myself; this intensity has spilled into every aspect of my life, leaving stains everywhere.  

In high school, I had two boyfriends. I asked both of them on our first dates, and to start dating. My first boyfriend and I met the summer before my sophomore year, the start of his senior year. I remember the first time we kissed. I didn’t know what it meant afterwards. The next time I saw him, we had a shift together (we both were lifeguards at a local pool), and he drove me home. While I sat in his car, I remember having the most direct conversation ever. I simply turned to him and went, “So we kissed. And I like you, and you like me. Anything you want to ask me?” No flirting, no room for confusion. Direct and to the point. Although our relationship started direct, it quickly descended into a period of uncertainty and grey area. We never broke up; he just stopped responding to me and moved to college after we dated for a year. Needless to say, this was a tumultuous time for my 16-year-old self, who does not handle confusion well and had never been broken up with before. I couldn’t ascribe a label to what was happening to me. I had never lived it, my mom didn’t have this experience, my friends hadn’t dated yet, and this had never happened in any of my favorite rom-coms. During this weird breakup without a breakup, I remember texting him a lot. I remember slowly realizing that I had been ghosted. I remember feeling embarrassed, confused, and hurt. Hurt does not even begin to encompass how I felt. 

Even though I’m now a sophomore in college and have spoken about this issue extensively in therapy, it is still something that haunts me. I cannot pursue people. I can’t show that I’m a tryhard. I can’t put myself in a vulnerable position. Even though I am so apt for clarification in every aspect of my life, my love life is not one of those. I let things happen to me. My candor is no longer labeled as cute or charming, but instead weird. “She is so clingy and obsessive” is a refrain that echoes through my head. I realize that I encourage my friends to always tell people how they feel. I realize I am a hypocrite. I realize that I have written a piece called “Getting it all out,” in which I encouraged people to be vulnerable, but suddenly, when I’m in that position, I can’t. 

I hate being a tryhard. It’s so juvenile, to feel this way, but I hate to feel this need for people to constantly understand me. I hate that I have to overexplain every little step in my head in order to justify all of my actions and reactions. It takes a lot for me to let someone in. In my mind, letting someone in includes showing all of these vulnerabilities that I hate about myself. I have an even harder time knowing when it’s appropriate to let someone in. I don’t understand the spaces in between. I don’t understand the uncertainty. I don’t do well with rejection. I recently felt the need to explain all of this to one person, as an attempt to end the in-between phase I was stuck in, and for the first time in my life realized it was a gift to feel this way. 

I let someone in for the first time in almost 2 years. It ended badly. It felt like a Taylor Swift song. Starting over the moon, and then watching it all collapse down. Walking out into the rain, crying, and being followed out. Regardless, I learned a lot. We fought. And as usual, I felt the need to shine light on my side of the story. I needed to explain my perspective and why I acted the way I did because I cannot fathom the idea of not fixing something. Truth be told, I can’t handle not being a tryhard. If I’m ending something, I need to know I did everything in my power to keep it from happening. I can’t leave anything up to chance. I explained exactly how I felt. I explained why I reacted in the way I did. I brought up what hurt me. I explained that I was sorry, but that I felt used. And that when I feel used, I freak out. I explained that I don’t do well with uncertainty, and I know that’s something I need to work on. I explained that when I’m going through a difficult time, I know how to cope. I explained that I had been in this situation before, and would not do it again because I put effort into myself. I try hard on myself. And I was met with a blank stare. How lucky am I to know why I feel the way I do. I was met by someone who explained to me that they’re sorry. That they don’t know why they acted the way they do. That they don’t know how to cope. How lucky am I to know how to cope. How lucky am I to know how to articulate my feelings. How lucky am I to know how to fix issues. 

So, maybe being a tryhard isn’t so bad. Maybe the years of taunts from my peers calling me a tryhard, clingy, or obsessive proved to be helpful. It shaped me into who I am today. It shaped me into a person who will work hard to fix my issues, who will never let someone assume something about me. I am the only person who can control my life, and my fate. I will not let something happen to me. That’s a beautiful thing, to be able to care and show people that you care. For once in my life, I’m glad to be a tryhard.

Written by Liv Kessler

Edited by Giulia Mauro

Graphic by Declin Mageau

Heated Rivalry, 10 Things I Hate About You, 27 Dresses and, hell, even Glee. Besides being almost perfect works of media, what do these all have in common? They all show us the ups and downs of relationships. When you think about romance, or consume any form of media dedicated to it, you see the emotional rollercoaster ride that comes from being in a relationship. Most stories end with the couple together, overcoming their difficulties for the sake of their love. They show us heartbreak, but usually also a form of forgiveness. I’ve been told that’s not necessarily realistic – not that I would know. The romance we usually see is either happy, feel-good fluff or explosive drama-filled angst with exaggerated characters and situations, which isn’t representative of realistic relationships with boring days and disappointing endings. 

I love a good rom-com as much as the next person (maybe more, if we’re being honest) and I get overly invested in fictional couples. Maybe it’s my lack of experience when it comes to relationships that makes me so excited when two (very fictional) people get into a (very fictional) relationship and makes me sad when they have a (very fictional) breakup. I live in a time where there's a new romcom every weekend and at an age where my friends are all getting in and out of relationships or situationships or hookup-ships or whatever the ever-growing lists of terms is. 

On one hand, I resent my generation's obsession with love and sex. It feels like all anyone cares about or wants to talk about and it bores me. It just feels shallow and repetitive, as though we should be spending time on other things. On the other hand, I’m a bitter and petty person who is willing to admit I only care because I don’t have much to say. In situations like these, I cling to the same pathetic stories that have been told so many times that they don’t mean anything personal to me beyond being anecdotes I tell for the sake of feeling included. 

Whilst I’ve come to terms with being single for as long as I have, that doesn’t mean I’m not aware of what I’m missing out on. The experience and the feelings of someone loving you and choosing you are something I’ve only ever imagined in my head, over and over. In my head, I’ve been loved but never heartbroken. I’ve never had to experience the kind of pain that everyone talks about being the worst thing they’ve felt. The feeling and experience that has so many songs and movies written about it that everyone knows how much it sucks, even if you’ve never had it personally, like me. The weird part, though, is that it doesn’t make me scared of it or want to avoid it. It makes me want it more. 

Obviously, I’m not saying that I want to be hurt, by no means. The funny part is that I have had my heart broken in other ways (friends, family) but never the classic way – never because of a failed romance. And truthfully, it’s not the same. I feel like there’s an important, pinnacle human experience that I’m missing out on. That I’m listening to my favorite songs or watching my favorite movies from an outsider perspective. I love them and I understand how important they are to people, but to me it’s just another form of entertainment that is almost as unrelatable to me as the serial killer horror movies I watch. 

So I guess all of this is to say that at the root of it, no matter how fucked up it makes me seem, I want to be heartbroken. Because heartbreak – the romantic kind, that is – proves that at some point you were in a relationship with someone who loved you and chose you. Yes, that ended, which could've been a result of something as simple as falling out of love or bad timing or something as painful as cheating. But what matters is that it happened. One day you can look back on the heartbreak and the memories – good and bad – fondly or at the very least as something that helped you grow as a person, a partner and maybe even a friend. 

Each time one of my friends has been heartbroken by their partner, they come out of it for the better. It gives them an opportunity to be better in future relationships and look for something better in future partners. I’ll be starting from scratch pretty much. When I get into my first relationship (though at this point it’s starting to feel more like an if than a when), I’ll be behind everyone else. I won’t have firsthand knowledge or experience for what I want, who I want to be with or how I want to be in the relationship. And, if I’m being honest, that scares me a little.

So the truth is, I wanna be heartbroken. I want to experience the joy and excitement, the love and beauty and fun of being in a relationship with someone I love and who loves me. I want to experience the pain and sadness, the horror and tragedy of being heartbroken. I want to experience the growth and the satisfaction of the aftermath, of being a newer and better person. I want that normal human experience.

Written by Daria Shepelavy

Edited by Ashley O'Doherty and Elisabeth Kay

Graphic by Elisabeth Kay

When I asked my mom to describe what I was like as a child, she told me I never cared what people thought of me. I was content to play by myself, but that might have been an adaptation to my environment. The little street I lived on was connected to a highway—if you drove too fast, you would miss it (sometimes the school bus did). There was the lady who never had fewer than seven dogs at a time, my babysitter and her entire extended family, and a bunch of old people who all looked the same. They were great for buying Girl Scout cookies, but not so much for camaraderie. Daycare and entertaining my younger siblings were typically the closest I got to playdates, and my elementary school friends changed every year, depending on who was arbitrarily put in the same homeroom as me.

My memories become a lot more vivid when I get to the 6th grade, but maybe that’s because I never really forget. I remember the two girls I created a comic book series with (one of whom became my best friend the following year), who decided it would be funny to ignore me and see how long I would follow them around, trying to get their attention. In the 7th grade, my best friend and I walked to the dollar store (our favorite place to hang out) to buy supplies for a school project. We were mummifying Barbies. I came to class the next day, and she told me that another girl’s mom had called her mom and told her to switch partners, so her daughter wouldn’t be left out. My teacher didn’t allow groups of three, so I had to stick wet gauze on a doll by myself, while failing to hold in my tears. Looking back, I’m not convinced that phone call ever actually happened. 

Given my somewhat sheltered childhood, it’s no wonder that I never found my place with the kids my age. I could never tell when people were being mean—if they were laughing at me or with me. I seemed to always find myself in trios–that were probably duos I didn’t realize I wasn’t included in– or being best friends with a girl with a big personality whose shadow I always let myself be forced into. This girl was always the “funny friend”, the “social friend”, or the “mom friend”, but what kind of friend was I? Was I the charity case? Was I the pity friend? I might've been the weird friend, but by the end of high school, I definitely became the quiet friend; the one who, in a class of the same 60 kids since Kindergarten, they could never quite get rid of. My little sister tells me that she was always jealous of my high school friend group, but she didn’t know how I felt—caught between the guilt of having everything I thought I wanted, but wondering why it didn’t feel like enough. 

In college, I threw myself into academics because I was determined to “make it out” of my small town; to prove it to myself or to others that I could… I’m not really sure. It shouldn't have mattered what they thought, knowing I would never see any of them again. I will never show my face at a high school reunion because I've outgrown them all and have no one to go with. It's a bit weird to suddenly have so much control over your life after years of making choices to appease others. I still find myself uncertain of what role I should take on in friendships, because the greater part of my life has felt like a performance. Who am I when I try to break these patterns of submission? Where is that little girl who was unapologetically herself? Can I still find her after all that I know now?

I crave guidance and direction, and maybe a small part of me craves someone to tell me who I'm supposed to be. I kept thinking I would have it all figured out when I reached this loose definition of “older”, but I woke up at 22 feeling more lost than ever. This year has been a time of picking up the pieces of all the phases and changes I’ve gone through, and deciding what parts of myself I want to take with me into the next stage of my life. There are so many sides of myself I have yet to explore, and childhood interests I’ve reclaimed that bring me closer to the girl I once was so ashamed of—I hope I will have more compassion for myself this time around.

Written by Renee Arlotti

Edited by Lauren Deaton and Giulia Mauro

Graphic by Andie Shultz

Growing up, I was never the smallest kid. I was born a bulky baby, so I never quite shook it. My childhood spent swimming only served to further widen my shoulders and thicken my thighs. Weekly church potlucks led to plates piled high with sugary treats. The absence of sweets in my house, due to my dad’s diabetes, led to binging at my friend’s houses; gorging myself on food until my fingers were sticky and my stomach was churning. It felt like I just couldn’t get enough, like the food was filling some kind of void inside of me, even as it made me feel sick. 

Then, when I was 12, the doctor said, “You need to lose weight soon, you’re obese.” The words were like a gut punch to my stomach, a firm acknowledgement that something was wrong, that I was wrong. It was a firm statement confirming that the way my pants stretched around my waist, and I was forced to yank them to the button, was horrible, disgusting. I remember staring at my clothes in my closet, pinching the fat around my stomach, standing numbly in the shower. At swim meets, I would look down at my stomach, at the way my bathing suit cut into my back and rounded my belly. I would glance across the diving blocks to the others beside me at the starting line, measuring myself up to them. 

In middle school, when I started running cross country, the weight dropped off fast; my waist rapidly slimmed down, my pants dropped in size, the talk of obesity ceased. Running also meant that I could eat more, that I was hungrier, because oftentimes I was putting in upwards of 35 miles a week. I found a kind of freedom in it, that I could eat without abandon, without the shadowy weight of a heavier self. 

I got faster, I made varsity, I felt celebrated, but the weight didn’t stay off. This time, it came back in a mixture of muscle and fat, and I started to notice something– girls glaring at me at the start lines of races, looking into my face with surprise as I passed them, shocked that a stockier girl, with her spandex tight against her skin, could possibly outrun them. There was a kind of joy in this for me, a revelation in the fact that I could be bigger and still good, still be athletic, that perhaps this was simply the way my body was meant to be. Then there was the pain underneath it. The feeling that I still wasn’t doing something right, that I wasn’t a real runner, that I might have the endurance, and even a bit of the speed, but there was still something wrong, like I had to prove myself more because I looked different.

Now in high school, I was also struggling with intense reactions to food and extreme panic attacks. My stomach constantly ached, I was frequently crippled by cramps so intense that I couldn’t leave my bed, and in my junior year I missed school almost once a week for a doctor’s appointment. I dreaded eating anything, fear creeping over me about what kind of attack my body would launch against the food. The shape of my body constantly fluctuated, moving between intense bloating and feeling utterly drained. My anxiety rose too, often having to excuse myself from class to cry in the bathroom, heaving sighs and feeling bile rise in my throat as I tried to catch my breath. I would break down before races, insisting that I couldn’t do it, spending long bouts of time stuck in the bathroom before races, feeling so utterly sick that I thought I would hurl on the girl next to me.

Eventually, I had to stop running. A combination of chronic illness diagnosis and a continued pattern of injury leading to my breaking point. I felt weak, lost, like the thing that had given me some kind of agency and claim over my body was being pulled out from under me. My relationship with food changed, increasingly limited out of necessity, as my body stimulated allergic reactions to various foods. It was a new kind of gross feeling, one that I felt I couldn’t stop, couldn’t run away from, couldn’t exist without, my body literally rebelling against me.

And it’s something I still carry around years later. Even after discovering which foods specifically cause reactions, even after finding a new exercise routine, a way to eat and exercise and still exist as a human who eats both vegetables and ice cream. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I still feel that slippage, a desire to scrape the fat from my body. Sometimes, when I look around at the bar I still feel out of place, the tautness of my shirt, or the roll of my stomach over my jeans making me feel embarrassed. Sometimes, I still feel like that scared little girl, being told she was obese before she even had a chance to form any kind of image of herself.

Written by Lauren Deaton

Edited by Daria Shepelavy and Giulia Mauro

Graphic by Nina Southern

Every day I open Instagram, and I am reminded of what I am not—or rather, who I tell myself I should be. My feed is like a mirror that only reflects versions of people living the life I quietly collect on my Pinterest board titled “college.” It’s a strange kind of feeling, the kind that doesn’t come from wanting physical things, but from longing to be included. To be chosen. To be surrounded. To be wanted. To feel like I cleanly fit into the college life I envisioned for myself. 

Groups that stretch and fill the entire frame. Effortless digital camera pictures. “Day in the Life” posts filled with endless friends and side quests. I stare at them for way too long, wondering what it must feel like to live the ideal “college experience.” The candid nights out with  blurry laughs, half-closed eyes, and the perfect imperfection of being caught mid-laugh. They feel intimate and effortless, like happiness is just spontaneous for everyone else. I scroll past faces that seem to belong anywhere, clothes that fit just right, and confidence so bold you can feel it through the screen. It's the kind of beauty that looks unintentional, but clearly isn’t. 

Everyone says college is where you find your people. In all honesty, I have never felt so alone, and I have never been so aware of myself—how I look, how I speak, how I’m perceived. The fresh start and freedom college promises somehow turned into constant self-surveillance. Every interaction feels like it’s being quietly graded, and every silence feels personal. 

I catch myself spiraling into questions that I never used to ask. Why can’t I find friends? Am I not pretty enough? Am I not fun enough? Why didn’t they invite me? Do I take up too much space—or not enough? It’s exhausting how easily confidence fades when comparison becomes unavoidable, when worth is tied to invites, friendgroups, and social media. 

And yet, I know this is only a fragment of reality, curated and cropped. I know that friendships exist outside of the frame, that loneliness can appear aesthetic, and that smiling faces can turn sour behind the scenes. Still, knowing these facts does not stop the feeling. It doesn’t quiet the small voice that asks why it seems so easy for everyone else, and wonders what I'm doing wrong that prevents me from living this life. I’m trying to hold onto the truth that being unseen doesn’t mean I lack something—it just means the right people haven’t found me yet, and that my worth doesn’t disappear just because no one is there to post it. 

So I close the app, carrying the longing and the hope with me. Because maybe deeply wanting this means I’m capable of it, even if it hasn’t found me yet. Maybe the life I dream of doesn’t look like a post, and the friends I desire actually desire me too.

Written by Avery Polinsky

Edited by Kate Madden and Elisabeth Kay

Graphic by Sydney Williams

In middle school, I had a very intense slam poetry phase. I was obsessed with one poet in particular, Olivia Gatwood. I was so convinced that her carefully inflected, earnest meditations on girlhood had been written about my life– never mind that most of them tackled sex and relationships, and I was a late bloomer who didn’t even have a serious crush until junior year of high school. I wrote quotes of hers in my diary, listened to performances about period sex out loud around my Catholic parents, wrote her one very enthusiastic email, and paid ten dollars to attend a live stream she hosted that benefited a mutual aid organization—all during seventh grade. If this makes you think I was a deeply insufferable thirteen-year-old, you’d be correct. 

When I got to high school, I traded Button Poetry performances for Lana Del Rey and found ways to repackage how I expressed my love-hate relationship with being a teenage girl. But now that my prefrontal cortex is a touch more developed, I have more respect for both my angsty preteen self, who found an outlet during a turbulent period of life, and for the wisdom permeating Olivia’s poetry. Her poem “Alternate Universe in Which I Am Unfazed By Men Who Do Not Love Me” is one of her most popular and my personal favorite. She imagines a world in which she trades the time she would have spent ruminating about men for life-affirming alternatives. 

“but left over from the other universe are hours and hours of waiting for him to kiss me and here, they are just hours. here, they are a bike ride across long island in june. here, they are a novel read in one sitting. here, they are arguments about god or a full night’s sleep. here, i hand an hour to the woman crying outside of the bar. i leave one on my best friend’s porch, send my mother two in the mail.” 

I still love these lines. It feels like I’ve let other people’s opinions dictate my entire life, especially men’s. For a while, I fell into a kind of half-joking misandry, but it came from a place of deep insecurity and hurt: starting with elementary school bullies, then a boy telling me he wanted to douse me in gasoline and light me on fire when I was in sixth grade, and then the humiliation that comes with having an adult’s body and a young girl’s mind. It was eye rolls when I spoke coupled with not-so-subtle glances at my chest, whispered comments in classrooms and at debate tournaments, my male high school guidance counselor icily telling me I was nothing and would never be anything. I’d spend all my energy seething with anger or sobbing into my pillow, wondering what was so wrong with me that all guys seemed to hate me. 

The freedom of college (and a great deal of cognitive behavioral therapy) has allowed me to regulate my nervous system a bit, recognizing the role I played in these interactions while also letting me detach from opinions that I know shouldn’t matter. This semester, I’ve spent so much time in formless sweats that I sometimes forget about my gender until I’m walking on the street at night. But recently, when a guy blew up at me over a poorly executed joke, I was sent back into the same spiral of anger and indignation, and embarrassment. Two years ago, I would probably have screamed back at him and proceeded to spend months telling every person in my life how he had wronged me. Part of me is still tempted. Part of me is still thirteen, wondering if I should just stop talking forever. But instead, I am choosing to listen to Olivia. Here, they are just hours. Instead of stewing, I will walk through Schenley Park, get coffee with an old friend, stare my shame down instead of letting it fester. “The man tells me who he is, and I listen. I have so much beautiful time.”

Written by Miriam Spak

Edited by Renee Arlotti and Giulia Mauro

Graphic by Lauren Deaton