Girlhood / Sparkle
a perpetual threshold crossing which nothing would ever be the same again
Dear reader,
I spent the winter delineating this piece. I’ve wanted to research and explore the concept of girlhood and sparkles since forever ago. One day, I wore a dress that left glitters everywhere and I thought, what does it mean to sparkle? On New Year’s Eve, Selin called me to set resolutions. She showed Riya and I a gorgeous pair of pink Manolos she tried on and said, “this year, I wanna do girlhood with you.” If girlhood is that liminal journey of identity exploration with the candor of expression, then everyone is a girl. Here’s to forever being in our Carrie Bradshaw era.
Erica x
Since November, I’ve sat with myself wondering if I really know what love is.
The winter is a thread strung between an end and a beginning. In all of its festivity and artificiality, layered warmth and cruelty, the darkened season is a confusion out of which new paths reveal. Being wrong is uncomfortable when what you thought was love turns out to be far from it. I can go around in circles rationalizing, trying to make the shape fit; but there comes a moment, the hardest moment, where I must decide whether to succumb to the truth.
Perceptions are clouds wrapped around reality so thickly. It saddens me when feelings ash-ify — is that a word? — into dead information instead of a woven bond. When we feel hurt, most of the time, someone else is doing the damage. But all of the time, we are the one letting them.
But I’m writing this at my coffee table as the winter sun pours through the window, and there’s a little glisten where the light touches the tiles by the stovetop. The slight warping of the old Georgian glass says all perception is refraction. Light softly arrives, and the whole room…
sparkles.
Oozy memories of sparkles: smooth surfaces. Metallic ballerinas. A punchy word choice. My glittery dress that leaves fairy dusts everywhere — in my carry-on, on the bathroom floor, on my pillow. I was here and there. Signs of warmth. Things visible in the dark, because of the dark. The release of energy. Travelling photons. My friend’s eyes across a table when we talk.
Sparkle | ˈspärk(ə)l |
verb. to sparkle is to be unstuck from shadows
noun. life’s innate response to light
a state of being noticed; small, but not nothing
Claire Marie Healy describes girlhood as a portal1 — like Alice’s, either too big or too small for the world. A girl shows up dreamy and full of feelings, full of change. She finds herself at a perpetual threshold where stability meets the unknown. Coming of age is like making eye contact and realizing for the first time that the world is gazing at you, that it has an agenda. As girls, we learn to feel the gaze before we understand it, and then we spend the rest of our lives deciding whether to perform for it or refuse it.
Girlhood is cracking open both the fragility and the devouringness (Healy 2023).
Think Lorde’s discography — from Pure Heroine to Melodrama to Solar Power to Virgin — an opus that will go down in history as the anthropology of girlhood feelings. Human feelings that girlhood happens to express most fluently: the loneliness, the electric sense of possibility, the ache of things ending before you understood what they were. All girls are artists playing with emotion, sensitivity, and empathy.
“I feel like a dark, gloomy piece of cloud right now. I am full of bad energy,” I said to Selin.
“Even if you are one floating towards me, I would give you a hug.” She continued to peel her banana.
Girlhood is getting ready with friends. The fit check is a microcosm of the am-I-doing-the-right-thing-in-life check. Everything is an inner declaration. Real girl friendship is a mirror of honesty. The frown you are trying to hide, the sad eyes you think I can’t read. Be yourself and that’s enough for me. Crying is mandatory. Joy is mandatory. All of it is.
It would be easy to say that in the arms of friendship, we come forward and unstuck. The heartbreak hurt so much I thought I could die. But I didn’t. I am happier now and better than before. It takes completely shattering yourself to reach a new status quo, to re-fill your cup. My life changed because it had to. All this while, my friends held me through my girlhood winter, holding pieces of me together when it felt like nothing would ever be the same again.
Joan Didion wrote that “people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.”2
Didion again: “one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards — the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.”
Self-respect, despite sounding tough and mature, is the thesis of girlhood. All winter, I’ve been holding those cards, pouring hope into something that was never luminous. I still don’t know if there’s a right way to it, but I am putting down the cards and sitting with my less-than-graceful exit.
The glitter still finds me: on my floor, in the lining of my bag, weeks after the night it came from. I was there, but now I am here.
Look Again: Girlhood (2023) by Claire Marie Healy
On Self-Respect (1961) by Joan Didion
Thanks for making my morning Erica ❤️loved this