For as long as I can remember, I have been the definition of a “girly girl.” My first friend was my younger brother, who sometimes felt like my twin (due to age, not similarity). Growing up together seemed to only highlight our differences—our parents would give us almost identical presents on our birthdays, which were only two weeks apart, but his would be “boy” themed, and mine would be “girl” themed. As the older sibling, I never looked up to him or aspired to be anything but myself.
I was never interested in typical “boy” things. I watched my brother discover sports, superheroes, toy cars, and action figures, but I was completely enthralled by the joys of girlhood. My three-story dollhouse had a bigger presence in our playroom than all my brother’s toys combined, and I still had room in my tiny heart for princesses, playing dress-up, and all things stereotypically girly.
My only complaint about girlhood was that the color pink seemed to claim me. Maybe I began to hate the color because I resented the fact that I never had a choice in the matter. I was helpless to the first pink gift given to my mother at my baby shower, a reflection of marketed sexism and the pink tax costing women more than just financially. Maybe I was tired of never having control of my own life, so I repealed the first decision that was ever made for me in an act of rebellion against a society that assigned me pink at birth.
Or maybe I was breaking the last connection to a happy childhood that was left in the dumpster with my toys when we got evicted from my childhood home. I felt detached from the blissfully naive girl I once was and associated the color pink with the weakness of someone in denial. I always loved playing house as a child, so didn’t I deserve to be shoved into the role of parenting my little sister? I got too comfortable feeling equal to my brother, so didn’t I deserve to be reminded that my childhood was for learning how to be a homemaker, while his was for simply being a child?
I hated society for putting all this meaning into a color, but also myself for not being above it. In my teen years, I wanted to distance myself from things that were “too girly” as a whole. As I was learning to accept a sexuality in which I loved girls, at the same time I was distancing myself from them. In a way, I thought that hating girls would bring me closer to loving them. I saw the acceptance of masculine and androgynous women within my community and decided that being feminine could never be enough. Even within a space that men were never invited to, here I was accommodating the male presence through heteronormativity and internalized homophobia.
I thought I was denouncing gender roles by rejecting the color associated with femininity, all while judging other girls based on their relationship with the color pink. I thought I was standing against misogyny by hating pink, when really I was feeding right into it, using a color as a reason to destroy female solidarity. I blamed the ugliness within myself on the ugliness of a color and held the acts of society against the ones that weren’t to blame, girls who were victims as much as I was.
One of the biggest challenges from my college experience is also the one I owe most of my growth to. I was forced to leave the familiarity of my small town and the same 60 peers from kindergarten through graduation, forced to make new connections, or to sit with the uncomfortable thoughts I avoided for so long. I was finally free from the people I always felt I owed explanations to, the people that made me feel bad for changing who I was, or becoming the person I always had been deep down.
For as long as I can remember, I have been the definition of a “girly girl,” and I still am. Nothing makes me feel more confident than feeling pretty and nothing makes me feel prettier than feeling feminine. Nothing feels more rewarding than reclaiming a color that was used as a weapon and accepting the parts of my identity that I tried to deny. Now I realize that my hatred was never for the color pink, or even for femininity itself, it was the hatred for who I was inherently, something I had no control over.
But identity can’t be defined by society, least of all by a color.
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