The Lost Years Part 1 - Not Me too, I'm a Good Girl
In a year of loss, losing self to CPTSD, health issues spawned from it, and dealing with the wreckage caused by an emotionally abusive relationship, I'd never had more reason to think. While I made sense of the experiences I'd had in 2022, and the ones I've had through much of my life and could see other women having, I'd started to make some connections. I noticed that unfortunately many of the men I would encounter, for one in particular , they felt a comfort in being cruel, one that I'd never encountered in a close relationship with a man. The way that cruelty so freely and easily expressed itself reshaped my life and brought to light, what was a chilling reminder of the reality of living as a woman, a young woman, and a black woman. Alongside these threads, I challenged myself to reexamine and interrogate my own notions of what it meant to be a human on this earth, what it meant to be a good person, and what human beings owed each other.
From those musings, come "The Lost Year" essays. These essays are true and honest as I feel no shame for the things I'm about to disclose. Some of them may be shocking or salacious or controversial, but I fear no conceptions of my self. I've lived an honest and authentic life and through these essays, I'll share some parts of that with you as I prepare versions of them for submissions, and one of them for publication.
If anything here is triggering to you, or you feel you need support, my inbox is always open. I'm happy to engage on any of these topics. Thank you, as always, for keeping tabs.
Be a good girl. I've heard these words for my entire life. For a long time, this idea of being a good girl had been this core staple of how I saw myself, an ever-present standard by which most, if not all of my actions would be held to. Being a good girl was a central facet of who I was. I did choir. I was in honors and AP classes. I served my community. I was an RA, TA, retreat leader. I sponsored another Haitian girl and led programs to serve underprivileged communities . I went to church every Sunday. I bought a house for my mom when I turned 24, fulfilling my first-generational debt to my immigrant mom, fulfilling the American Dream. I didn't drink heavily or do any sort of drug until I was safely out of the window where partaking in such would jeopardize my future. All of these were done partially because it contributed to the idea of what I thought being a good girl was.
Throughout the time being conditioned as good girl, I picked up on so many messages about how to be behave and conduct oneself in the world. Good girls don't make a fuss. I didn't have the freedom to cry without being accused of whining. Good girls are quiet, patient, docile. We weren't allowed to be loud and rowdy like boys. Good girls give. We were staples of our families. We were giving and thoughtful. We couldn't and be selfish. So many of these messages had become to deeply ingrained within me. I had always been very careful with myself, with who I engaged with, how I engaged with, what risks I took. When I was 8 my childhood friend Stephanie had died in accident at our local amusement park. From then on my mother held me even tighter, always emphasizing that I ,always ,like all good girls, should "be careful.' And I deeply wove this into my good girl script with boys, with people, with everything.
On the outside, the good girl conditioning would look to be a way of instilling values and morality in women. For many women, their conditioning often required a trade-off between being strong or being safe and being good. Often it would have us biting our tongues, minimizing our experiences , and thereby ourselves in order to avoid the creation of friction and discomfort for other people. In so many ways is this a corrosive force. We as women censor and silence ourselves in situations where we need to be vocal, simply for fear of not appearing good or looking mean or bitter. We cut off our own humanity, restricting ourselves to only experiencing and showcasing a societally deemed acceptable range of emotions. We can not be angry. Boys can. We can not be hurt. Boys can and we coddle them by if they are. We cannot be honest, least of all with of ourselves. And in so many ways, we come to find how in minimizing our own experiences, we shrink ourselves. And unfortunately in doing so, we create a perfect pathway for patriarchal violence to exploit and harm us. We're stuck in a loop trying to be the good girl even under the most horrific of circumstances.
In the past year, I've thought about my recitations from my good girl script, and how deeply I clung to it. I was a good person and that had always given me a sense of joy and inner peace with myself. I have deeply entrenched good girl based moral code. So you'd seldom find me any position to deviate from the good girl script. But it wasn't until I encountered someone who was truly bad that I could put down my good girl script long enough to realize why so much harm had been inflicted on me and the failings of my good girl script in protecting me. As I thought, so heavily about women and the good girl script, I wondered what conditioning our society had provided to men. And what I found was that there is an incredibly sparse or even equivalent good boy script.
Being a good girl, and this concept, is oddly reverberated throughout the entire life of a woman. For boys, it drops off some time between 9 and 12 years old. For women, we are ingrained with ideas long throughout our lives that good girls must act certain ways. We help others. We are kind and considerate. We give. We think of everyone else around us. We're never selfish. We never yell or cry too loud. We keep quiet, and subsequently all too often, end up suffering quietly for fear of no longer being considered good girls. But men aren't really conditioned to be good. For boys, the bar is shockingly low. It is , if anything, be decent, yet there is often a wide latitude with what we consider as decent for men. There are little consequences even much coddling when they fall atrociously far from that standard. Even when petering towards extreme, we often find ourselves minimizing any sort of incident or even pattern of these instances as to protect those men and our own associations with them.
I noticed that with many men, there was a certain freedom that they had to be bad, to be unruly, to even be destructive. They could be selfish and uncaring, as long as they were funny or provided some sort of social benefit. They had freedom to roam, skirting past lines of decency or morality. But had a woman displayed a modicum of such unruly "bad" behavior, she would be easily chastised and discredited for any deviation from the good girl script. And in the case that men were chastised for making too much of a mess, ultimately all their destruction would be swept under the rug with some version of "boys will be boys". In a very real way, I've come to see on several occasions how that message is so underlying in all of the ways we excuse men of harm, particularly towards women. I've seen how deeply we wish to excuse and minimize the harm that men do, while holding women to unrealistic standards or angelic silence and complacency. But that urge often causes us to do a deep disservice to women. I say this with the humility of knowing that I've been absolutely complicit and have by accident regurgitated this message, even in situations where the harm leveraged against other women was great and even in situations where I was the one being harmed.
By way of unfortunate luck, I have come to know two men intimately that have confessed to me that they've sexually assaulted women. Now that wasn't the way it was framed to me when they first disclosed what they had done, but in looking back this year, I'd finally been able to assign the label that was fitting. Whether it was via an inappropriate touch or actively disregarding the revoked consent of their female partner, they had crossed the boundary. And in understanding how I was able to come to terms with what they'd done, I'd realized that very often they'd posited themselves first as victims of their guilt or their shame. Where sexual assault should've been the obvious dealbreaker, they'd both learned to how to activate my empathy by displaying their shame rather than the accountability they've taken and amends they'd made to the women they'd harmed. And by effectively being able to weaponize my empathy for them in situations where they were not the victim, they were able to activate my recitation of the good girl script. Good girls are nurturing , we empathize. We comfort. And so in comforting their shame, I'd found myself snapping into this role of caretaking for men even when it was clear that they were the offenders and not the victim. But by operating in this place of empathy as opposed to enforcing accountability, I had subconsciously made it seem like what they had done was ok. As they both had deep self worth issues and issues with shame, in my continued nurturing and support of them, I tried my best to affirm that they were still worthy of being loved, and had given them my love freely to show this. I was a good girl. I have empathy. I am loving. I can help them with their shame and support them through their growth.
But as I worked tirelessly to dismantle their walls of shame, I'd come to find that just behind them still lay the exact same behaviors and attitudes that caused them to selfishly disregard the autonomy and well-being of women, very much alive and well. But even when those same tendencies would rear their heads to cause me harm, another part of my good girl script read out, Be empathetic, be calm don't cause too much of a fuss. Ask them why, have a calm, focused conversation. But never would I find the part of my script that would say this man is dangerous and unsafe, you should leave. And so while I focused on helping them patch up their wounds, their attention would be turned towards themselves. And in their relentless focus on self, they would come to disregard my humanity in ways that would shock me, despite their histories of doing so. But the good girl urge was to minimize, was to say If I can have a calm and empathetic conversation about it, then we can work through it. I'd come to help these men realize why they were harmful towards me and then they'd naturally stop harming me. I'd respond to their cruelty with kindness because that is what good girls do.
On many occasions these men would come to me to soothe them and to help remedy their deep self-worth issues. And because they seemed so fragile and broken, I was intent on protecting them, often times unfortunately from the truth of the situation and from the consequences of their action. Good girls don't punish. We accommodate. We listen. I found myself so caught up in this cycle of being the shoulder to cry on , in being the strong supportive partner, and often times the good one. And in this regular pattern of providing this emotional support , I became so frequently invested in protecting these men, that it became more difficult to see them as offenders, even when the offenses they were committing were against me.
I made the the concessions , provided them with much grace, thinking their bad behavior was just tiny slip ups. But on reflection of at least one of those relationships, it was pretty routine. Every few weeks, there'd be a new incident for me to forgive, followed by another spiral of unrelated shame that I'd have to step in to comfort. And as they got comfort from me, I'd almost forget that they'd hurt me shortly before. But I'd oscillate so frequently between comforting them and being hurt by them, that the whiplash made it almost impossible to have any clarity of the situation I was in. When one of these men had disclosed an incident they were involved with as a young adult, I'd started to see what I thought was the reason for their shame, I'd immediately thought I love you and I want to protect you. That was the first time I realized I'd loved him. A week later, he'd say something completely derogatory to me which would catch me completely off guard. And then a week after that he'd spend Valentine's with me. And that was the cycle.
I remember another instance where I was dating someone exclusively and they changed their dating app to pursue and explore connections with other people. This would become a recurring theme, them exploring other connections behind my back. When I spoke to him about it, he'd said "I didn't do right by you" and then divulged into a story about how he'd have this big outburst because he felt he was undeserving of love. I was so blinded by the vulnerability, that I hadn't thought to ask enough questions. When you are met with vulnerable confessions of deep character flaws, you think to empathize, not scrutinize. And I think personally this is where a lot of good girls, myself included go wrong with broken men. I'd come to find out almost a year and a half later that he had this outburst, in front of his then-girlfriend and had publicly humiliated her. But at the time, I'd been so overcome with empathy, thinking this is a really hard way to feel, I'd forgotten about what he'd done to me. I'd even felt so close to him in this moment, that I didn't even feel the pain of his betrayal. I'd go on to tell him that he was capable and that I'd be right there with him, pledging my loyalty to him. I began repairing him, neglecting my own wound because Good girls take care of others.
For many women , training us to be good girls in a world where we enable many bad men, sets us up for failure. In our good girl scripts, we are often missing chunks on when and how to enforce accountability and implement consequence, instead of providing unlimited empathy. Our ability to empathize with harmful men, puts us in a position where often times we downplay and minimize our own pain and discomfort. We don't call a spade a spade. This emotional dishonesty and misplaced empathy almost works to communicate to men "I still love and protect you. I don't care if you sexually assaulted or abused past girlfriends or other women." We inadvertently and subconsciously communicate to men that there are no consequences to harming women. And when that thought is deeply ingrained in men and mistakenly enforced by society, specifically women, we give men the freedom to harm women. And when those women are victimized, we discredit those women after they've fought to not discredit themselves.
The good girl script tells those women to keep quiet, to minimize and make excuses, repeating to ourselves some variation of phrases like : Don't call it assault . Don't call it abuse. Maybe he just lost his cool. Maybe he's having a bad day (every 2 weeks and taking it on me but digress). It's not that bad. Maybe you're dramatic. Maybe you're confused. Whatever excuse minimizes the situation enough to make it easier to digest and ignore the moral and character implications of the bad behavior. In my case, it was a woman saying to me "don't call it abuse" due to her own desire to minimize an experience she was not a witness to, simply to absolve herself of her own cognitive dissonance. And when we regurgitate these phrases all we reinforce is that : Good girls shouldn't use words that feel to heavy or uncomfortable. A good girl must be quiet , suffer silently. Men are free to be aggressive, abusive, combative and frankly evil. But when that is the case, when that is the society we foster through our actions, women will always suffer. Even if they do everything right, even if they turn the other cheek a thousand times over, even if they are a good girl, nothing, least of all the way we coddle men will protect good girls from bad men.
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