I’ve always been an odd duck.
Plagued with anxiety since I can remember,1 I used to hate when anyone laughed at me, paid too much attention to me, or tried to pry me away from my comfort zone. When adults would tell me I was cute, I would get embarrassed and insist that I was not, in fact, cute.
“Oh, is that right?” a given adult would ask, amused. “If you’re not cute, does that mean you’re ugly?”
“No,” I would reply, confused. “I’m just reg-uh-ler.”2
I was always creative, but didn’t delight in showing anyone my work. I was told that I was bright, but any time someone gave me a compliment, I felt embarrassed. I just wanted them to mind their own business and leave me alone! All I wanted to be was normal. After all, as Barney said, “Everyone is special in his or her own way!”
This only got worse as I got older. Classmates would snicker at me when I sang to myself. At the end of every year, at least a dozen classmates wrote “Stop studying, you brain!” in my yearbook. I was made to feel left out because I wasn’t allowed to watch the same TV shows and movies as most of my peers.3 I listened exclusively to Radio Disney until I was 12. I cycled through numerous career aspirations that people around me thought were unusual—author, spy, magician, choreographer, astronaut, director, songwriter, graphic designer, etc. I only wore baggy three-quarter-sleeve t-shirts, denim skirts, and bulky jumper dresses. Essentially, I slowly learned that I watched the wrong TV and movies, listened to the wrong music, wanted to be the wrong thing when I grew up, and dressed wrong.
What was right, then, exactly?!
I looked to the almighty Teen Magazines for answers.4 According to Seventeen, Tiger Beat, and J-14, I was supposed to be a boy-crazy shopaholic who lived for clothes and makeup, with a side of music from ✨dreamy✨ boy bands.
And so, around age 11, I put down my Barbies and tried on this persona. Jesse McCartney was my celebrity crush of choice, which I was later informed was incorrect.5 Nevertheless, I took whatever fold-up posters I could find in J-14 and put them up in my room. I briefly used the screen name—
*heave*
hold on, this is gonna take me a minute
the cringe is strong with this one
*deep breath*—
xXMrsMcCartneyXx.6
I shopped at Wet Seal for graphic tees with sassy slogans, and at Claire’s for funky lil earrings.
I watched a few reality shows with my parents that they had deemed acceptable for my innocent brain—American Idol, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and Survivor. I hung out at the mall more often. I tried to wear more ✨trendy✨ clothes and argued with my mom about how short my sleeves were allowed to be.7 I made AIM screen names like ReAlKnOcKoUt612 and xX8PrincessS8Xx to seem more girly💅 and edgy💁♀️. I tried to make my own glittery Dollz avatar for my AIM icon because I was a 💄💋💖NORMAL GIRL🌟👗👅!
In my quest for the perfect AIM icon—one that said “I’m a teenage girl and I’m ready to apologize for it”—I arrived at Iconator dot com. While I did find animated icons perfect for my 13-year-old sensibilities,8 I also found ones with esoteric song lyrics, with pretty animation flourishes. When I clicked on them, I learned that the lyrics were from songs by bands I’d never heard of before—bands like The Used, My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Senses Fail, Taking Back Sunday, and some new up-and-comers called Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco. And the creators making them were only 14 years old!
Somehow, in these halcyon pre-MySpace days, this website that did nothing more than host a bunch of 50-pixel-by-50-pixel animated GIFs was also a thriving social network for emo kids. People put their AIM screen names in their profile bios, and once you interacted with someone enough in the comments of their GIFs, one of you would say something like “add me xD rawr” and voila! FRIENDS!
This was still in the era when To Catch A Predator was popular and people assumed that anyone attempting to make friends on the internet was guaranteed to be a child predator, so I mostly kept this to myself. But oh, the worlds I traversed from inside my little Jewish bubble! Christian kids listening to bands like Flyleaf and Relient K! “Random” humor! Obsessions with dinosaurs and pizza! New emoticons like xD9 and :310 and 8D11! Scene haircuts with long bangs and clipped-in striped feathers! Eyeliner! So much eyeliner!!!
This was a society of (mostly) girls screaming I AM NOT LIKE THE OTHER GIRLS! And instead of being like, “Hey, if you’re not like other girls, but you’re very similar to other girls on this site, aren’t you sort of like some girls?” My 13-year-old brain went HELL YEAH! WE ARE NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS! WE ARE ✨DIFFERENT!✨
In a way, this was good! I started to feel less like I had to be something out of the pages of Teen People.12 I stopped being intimidated by people with non-ear piercings and tattoos. Hot Topic felt safe to browse because I knew all the band names on the T-shirts.13 My #1 radio preset became KROQ instead of KIIS FM.14 I knew all the words to Ludacris’s rap breakdown in “Yeah!” but I also knew all the words to “Our Lawyers Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued” by Fall Out Boy. In high school, I was able to be myself and be friends with the kind of person who would jam together with me to 30 Seconds to Mars and lend me their copy of some obscure book called Twilight.15
On the other hand, this was not so good! I started to feel quietly superior to the girls who would look at me funny and blow me off. I felt like my interests were somehow more profound than theirs; like I was somehow more mature because I could recognize Nirvana and Bad Religion on the radio, and read a horny-yet-chaste vampire story before everyone else did; because I was so over MySpace by the time it took off and just, like, didn’t care about makeup and thought The Hills was soooo vapid and overrated.16 💁♀️
It felt like there was this choice thrust upon me–either fit in with the expectations laid out for you in Seventeen and by your peers, or be Better and Not Like the Other Girls™. Because when people’s complaints about “vapid teenagers” didn’t apply to me, a teenager, that obviously meant that I was just a different kind of teenager who was better.
And yet, I knew there was a wider world out there with more people like me, and more people still entirely different from these 2 choices. Iconator aside, I grew up in Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the US. My neighbors wrote for TV shows. My classmates had famous family members. I grew up going to famous attractions like the Santa Monica Pier, Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, the Griffith Observatory, and Universal Studios, where people came to visit from all over the world. Around the corner from my childhood home were a Coptic church, a Sikh dharma, a Baha’i temple, and, a bit farther down, a few synagogues.17 I went to gymnastics and tennis lessons in the summer with kids from different backgrounds, and played basketball against Amazonian middle-schoolers in 6th grade. We’d see people with very different aesthetics everywhere, from the mall to the 7-Eleven around the corner. I knew my Orthodox Jewish world was a small, contained ecosystem inside of a very large, wide world. When it came time to go to college, I was excited to explore that world and meet a diverse array of people.
Alas, it would not be. After spending a year in Israel with other wonderful artistic weirdos, I was to go to Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University (colloquially known as Stern), a predominantly Orthodox Jewish school in New York.18 I had been to New York City once, in June 2003, and decided I hated it. I was being confined to yet another bubble in yet another large city in the US (that wasn’t the one I was born in and actually LIKED) and I was not happy about it.
In high school, the majority of my classmates made fun of Stern as a last-resort backup option. While I was in my gap year program, I very rudely joked to my Stern-bound roommate that, unlike her, I was “going to a real school.”19 How was I supposed to branch out? How was I supposed to meet the world while attending another small modern Orthodox Jewish school, where I already knew a good 25% of the student body?! I felt betrayed, confused, and once again like the pouty 14-year-old who was staunchly Not Like the Other Girls.
My last day in Los Angeles was a cruelly beautiful one—temperature in the upper 70s and sunny with a pleasant breeze. My mom booked a redeye flight from LAX to JFK so we would arrive right on time for orientation. At the airport, we spotted family friends also flying to New York for the beginning of the school year at Stern. One of them was a year ahead of me, and had been nothing but nice to me our whole lives. But, that night, she committed the crime of wearing a Juicy zip-up velour hoodie and Ugg boots.
“Ugh,” I scoffed, rolling my eyes. “Classic Stern Girl uniform!”
My mom, utterly sick of my shit, shot me a look. “That’s extremely bitchy of you.”
“What?!” I replied, reeling from the shock of my own mother telling me I was being a bitch. “A lot of people wear that stuff! It’s not, like, an insult.”20
“That attitude isn’t going to make you any friends,” she said. I probably muttered back something about not wanting to make any friends anyway, and went back to doing my Sudoku puzzles.
After a miserable, sleepless flight, we landed in cloudy, muggy New York and made our way to Midtown Manhattan. Upon our arrival at what was to become my dorm, the clouds unleashed a torrent upon the asphalt and piles of garbage while we waited in line beneath some flimsy canopies. Since I was completely unaccustomed to rain in the summer months, let alone a straight-up thunderstorm, I felt this only confirmed my similarly stormy outlook on my time in New York City—or, as I had decided to start calling it, the Overrated Garbage Dump.21
After settling in and remembering that I had quite a few friends also attending Stern, a couple of friends and I decided to go see a movie at the theater a few blocks away. Just as I had thought that I might have been getting comfortable, some other Jewish college girls about our age walking opposite us spotted us and smirked. They veered closer to us and jeered, “Heyyy, Sternieees!”
My cheeks burned as they stalked off, laughing. How dare they make fun of me for simply attending an institution?! They didn’t know me! They just saw me on 34th Street! How dare they think they’re better th—
Oh.
I was just as guilty as these random girls on the street. Every time I assumed I was Not Like Other Girls, I was mostly judging other girls based on societal caricatures of the teenage girl. I didn’t know their inner lives. I didn’t know their dreams and aspirations; their pain and their sorrow. I didn’t know whether they liked shows I didn’t because they connected with those on a deeper level; whether they didn’t like the music I liked because it just didn’t resonate with them the same way. I knew that all my high school classmates were just as smart as I was, if not smarter. They all certainly worked harder than I did.
I had to dig deep and remember one of the foundational lessons I learned as a kid: “Don’t judge your peer until you have reached their position.”22 In trying to protect myself from the judgment of others, I had judged them harshly instead.
It took me a while to fully embrace this realization. But once I did, I found a community of people who may have been considered Not Like the Others in certain circumstances, but were actually just… wholly themselves. And I met people who might seem to “fit in” with a certain model, but turned out to be—as we all are—each their own multifaceted, complex person.
Throughout my three years at Stern, I would inevitably hear other students sneer about “Stern Girls.” It was very common for all of us to deride this stereotype, despite all being girls (or rather, women) attending Stern. After I’d graduated, I took a survey of current and former students about what a “Stern Girl” was to them. My findings revealed that a “Stern Girl” was different to each individual, and was almost always her opposite. The more modern and progressive students saw the Stern Girl as a sheltered, religiously-observant student who expected college to be just like their gap year program in Israel. The more traditionally observant and conservative students saw the Stern Girl as a more modern, progressive feminist who demanded dominance over men in every possible moment, no matter how small.
So, who was the Stern Girl, really? Maybe she’s all of us; perhaps she is none of us. Maybe the real Stern Girls were the frenemies we made along the way.
When did you realize that declaring yourself Different was counterproductive? Were you also an absolute cringe-monster of a human from ages 12-14? Please tell me all about it!
My earliest memory is being terrified of a clown at my 2nd birthday party, even though said clown was just a family friend in a costume.
(regular)
On the one hand, it was profoundly annoying to have only been allowed to watch PBS Kids until I was 12, and almost exclusively Disney & Nickelodeon until I graduated high school. On the other hand, my parents had enough sense to not let me see movies like Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me or Me, Myself, and Irene in theaters when I was 7-8 years old. ✨Balance!✨
At my friends’ houses, of course. G-d forbid those entered my house, where we only read classy publications like People!
At the time, he was only known for Disney stuff. A friend gave me a copy of Beautiful Soul for free because she didn’t want it. A year later, he exploded in popularity, and she came to regret that decision. 😎
I WILL NOT TOLERATE YOUR HECKLING. I AM ALREADY TORTURED BY THIS ON THE REGULAR.
I resent cap sleeves to this very day. Either be a sleeve or get out!!!
i.e. “edgy” jokes, animated up-and-downs of Dollz with some word like BRAT or COOL flashing in neon colors at the end before looping back to the beginning, that sort of thing
😆
🥹
😍
R.I.P. 🙏
I may not have listened to them, but I had heard of them!
For the non-Angelenos: KROQ, aka 106.7 K-R-O-Q FM Pasadena, Los Angeles, the World Famous K-ROQ, was the top alternative rock station. KIIS FM is, of course, Top 40 hits, and the home of Ryan Seacrest’s syndicated morning radio show, which he took over from the legendary Rick Dees. If all of this sounds like gibberish to you, you’re too young to be using retinol. Put down the Drunk Elephant.
Shoutout to Leah 👊
I mean… I still think The Hills and Laguna Beach were awful, but I no longer believe that this opinion makes me Special or Different, nor do I consider myself to be better than anyone who did enjoy them.
And, if you kept going, the Kabbalah Centre. 🤡
Long story short: I was supposed to go to the University of Maryland, YU gave me a scholarship, and I (well, my parents) wanted to take out as little in student loans as possible.
I was registered at UMD at the time and had no idea I’d end up not going there. She ended up transferring to Queens College after one semester, and I got stuck at Stern. Karma’s a bitch. (If I just got that Jojo Siwa song stuck in your head, I’m very sorry. Here’s my earworm cure.)
It was an insult.
New Yorkers please do not come for me! This was almost 15 years ago and I don’t call it that anymore!
Pirkei Avot 2:4