Over the years, I have been a quasi-Weezer fan. Their latest offering, Thank God for Girls, is a favorite of a friend’s child, and so we’ve listened to it many times.
This isn’t about Weezer, but before I segue into the real topic, let’s take a moment to reflect on the lyrics. Wait. Not all of them. That takes up a lot of space. Let me pull an excerpt.
“Thank God For Girls”
God took a rib from Adam, ground it up in a centrifuge machine
Mixed it with cardamom and cloves, microwaved it on the popcorn setting
While Adam was like “that really hurts”
Going off into the tundra, so pissed at God
And he started lighting minor forest fires, stealing osprey eggs
Messing with the bees who were trying to pollinate the echinacea
Until God said, “Ima smite you with loneliness
And break your heart in two”
And Adam wept and wailed, tearing out his hair, falling on his knees
Looked to the sky and said
“Thank God”
There. I liked that part, because osprey eggs. But it also speaks to this divide between men and women that I have always found interesting borderline fascinating.
I am a girl. I was born a girl, and, assuming I won’t be kidnapped and subjected to live human experimentation, I will die a girl.
I know girls, is my point. And, along my journey of girlhood, I have collected quite a few female friends. These chicks range from old school friends, to co-workers past and present, to acquaintances, to social friendships, to full-blown, check-in-text, honest-advice relationships.
These friendships include girls from all points in their individual life journeys. They run the gamut from my previous employees who are now attending college, to those in new relationships, to those freshly-divorced and starting to date again, to those freshly-divorced and very angry. They include the happily-married and the unhappily-married.
Altogether, we’re one big ball of hormones, at different points in our girl cycles.
It’s interesting.
The best part of being a girl are those days when you really have your shit together. You feel on top of the world. Your physical appearance is on point. People have told you how great your butt looks that day, or they love your hair, or makeup, or, even better, they’ve complimented your sense of humor, your intelligence. You feel unstoppable. Nobody’s gonna bring you down. You know it’s temporary, but you don’t care:
Those days are the best of the best. I personally wouldn’t know, but I’ve read a lot of articles about it in well-respected academic journals.
Then we segue into that horrible mid-zone, during which the slightest tip either way can send us to an internal dialogue of extremes. There is very little gray in this zone. Things feel black and white. The worst part about the mid-zone is that you don’t always know when it’s coming. Hell, you rarely do. The littlest thing can set you off, such as waking up like this:
It’s all downhill from there. The worst part about those days are that you KNOW crazy is coming, and you really, really want it to not come, but you’re ensnared in whatever awful, awful thing holds us, as women, down, and just, UGH. Whatever. Ladies, we all have our coping mechanisms in these dark days. Some of us try to reach out, with love desperation, before the darkness fully closes in. Some of us try to isolate ourselves to protect our loved ones from the storm a’brewin’, and some of us just go ahead and let the beast out, because it’s probably going to happen anyway.
The journey to hell is a slow one, and no matter how many times we take it, we will occasionally, erroneously, believe that there is an escape hatch. We can surround ourselves with love and light, and save this whole situation!, we think, with no small amount of false cheer and ill-suppressed tears. We don’t even know who we are as people anymore. Everything feels like a lie. Yes, everything. Even your stupid hair.
And then, finally, there are the dark days of chick-dom. The eclipse is full. No light can shine through. The black curtain has descended, and it’s fully weighted. Our reactions to everything are completely irrational. You’re combative even with your female friends:
Lord help our significant others, because it’s a whole lot of this (forgive me for these uses of one of my most-hated words, “bae,” but these pictures as a whole just completely fit, so)…
So, yeah. It’s a lot like that. And you know what the worst part is? Men don’t have these types of extremes all the time. Sure, we’re all human, and we all experience emotions from the entire spectrum, but to be a chick often means that you experience this emotional range hourly. And it SUCKS. SO BACK OFF.
Haha! Just kidding! I’m fine. FINE. Because if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to articulate. I would be building my fortress of solitude and not answering texts.
If you read this far hoping I was going to offer a solution to womanhood, sorry. I got nothing…save for the treat of this video that I have loved long time, from the incomparable Amy Schumer, that summarizes in such a perfect way what it means to be a woman in a group of women.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat my feelings and overthink.
