It's a girl?

I was reading a manga today where a girl was praised for becoming more feminine because it meant she was growing up.  It reminded me of some realizations I've been having about myself lately.  Hold on to your seats, ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in-between, because this is going to end up somewhere between a reflection on societal expectations and the nature of the self and an undercover exposé on the Oatmeal.  Probably significantly closer to the former.

Note: Blogger.com ate the entire body of my completed blog post, so forgive any frustration/anger/RAGE that leaks into here as I rewrite the whole thing.

I am a woman (that word feels so wrong.  When did I stop being a girl?  Why is there no decent female analogue of the word "guy"?  "Gal" doesn't count - it is a dumb word).  However, I never acted feminine growing up.  I was the girl who played video games all the time, who didn't like clothes shopping, makeup, or shoes, and who wore baggy shirts and hoodies all the time.  Seriously, my close high school friend told me that she found me in crowds consistently by looking for the tall brown-haired girl in a bright yellow or red hoodie.  It was a perfect system (well, except for the days when I was wearing a brown, black, or grey hoodie).  It was so bad that in middle school, when I took off my hoodie one day in math class, some classmates were legitimately shocked to find out that I had something approximating a figure and was not simply an amorphous mass of brightly cloth.  My hair was a blunt cut that my friends often told me looked horrible (in kinder words, but the sentiment got across) and I never washed my face.  I was, in short, a disgrace to what society considers femininity.  I was okay with that on the whole, though sometimes I wished to be more like the beautiful, fashion-conscious girls.

Even in my freshman year of college, my first year in a coed environment since middle school, things didn't much improve.  I stuck to my video games and my baggy clothes, though I was a bit more conscious about my concealer.  I got my hair cut, but all it did was add bangs to my now somewhat-shorter blunt cut.  Nothing significant had changed.

Last semester, though, something changed.  During the second half of my sophomore year, I started to research potential hairstyles for myself, seriously considering a professional haircut for the first time in my life. I bought a pair of dangly earrings on a whim to supplement my tiny diamond studs that I had worn nearly consistently for several years.  I accidentally severely decreased the amount of time I spent playing video games.  Worst of all, I wore a skirt voluntarily one day (it was laundry day, okay?), and though I thought it was strange and note-worthy and defended my reasons for doing so all day (I have a well-known grudge against skirts), NO ONE seemed to think it was out of the ordinary except two guy friends who commented on my related facebook status.  What happened to me?

At the end of the semester I realized what had been happening.  I had been changing without realizing it.  Part of me was happy; I was ready to become less of the crazy outsider that I had been my whole life.  Part of me, however, was very sad.  I missed my simpler existence in the time before makeup and dressing to impress and having boys in the local area.  I miss tossing on a baggy black D.A.R.E. t-shirt every weekend and then going to play Morrowind or the Sims all day without having to worry about social obligations.  But I'm growing up, and I accept that.  I can only hope that I'm becoming more feminine now because somewhere deep down I really want to, rather than social pressure or the universal law of girls growing up that the manga mentioned above seems to suggest.  I think that's the case.

Also, the author of the Oatmeal is secretly a fish.  I have no evidence for this except a non-existent gut feeling.  There's the exposé section of the post.