give me back my girlhood

postcard 61: the only girlhood essay i'll ever write; three journal entries throughout the past year

last time i posted journal entries, i lied! and called it fictional…so here i am, new and improved months later, saying that yes these are straight from my handwritten journal. i think with the increasing amount of subscribers and the nature of my content (various recommendations and cultural essays), i sometimes feel more like a brand and less like a human. so here is me trying to feel a bit more grounded and human.

all of these are pretty sad. that being said, this is not a cry for help or anything, i’m fine! i just momentarily go through these moments sometimes and that’s when i reach for my journal. i think (?) that some parts are relatable and worth posting. i just realized i’m not really vulnerable or personal on my substack and i think i kind of wanted to be for once. i may paywall the last one later, but i hope some of these sentiments resonate with you.

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1. landmine as anatomy (february 2025)

there is a ticking bomb in me. can you hear it? no? hold your breath for a second, count to three in your head. you hear it now, right? i must have swallowed it a little while ago. i didn’t realize that was what it was when i did, and i’ve been trying to dig it out of my chest cavity ever since. regret has bled into resignation, but i have a fear that it’ll multiply, metastasize, start thundering inside of me. i’m afraid that i won’t know when to squeeze my eyes shut and hold my breath when it inevitably explodes.

i didn’t notice it at first. i think it grew inside of me. a perfect environment for it to find a home in my organs, root itself inside of my veins, replace my arteries with its tangled red wires. but one night i was laying in bed and i began to hear it. the ticking. it thrived on cognizance, flourished on apprehension. the perpetual paradox of inadvertently feeding it by trying to rid of it, by being too aware of it, the monster under my bed. i learned how to perform surgery on myself, dissecting every inch of my body with a sterilized scalpel, collecting empirical data. i prayed that the size of the bomb would be proportional to its volume, the decibels of the ticking increasing each and every day.

days turned into weeks turned into months turned into years. i put myself in a test tube and saran wrapped the top. bereft of oxygen, in total numbness, i can visualize the bomb. it’s singed into my vision, branded into my closed eyelids. surgery turned into a steady flatline turned into rigor mortis turned into an autopsy. the room is thick with the stench of formaldehyde. and i still cannot find the bomb. the ticking stops post mortem, so i perform cpr on myself and barely bring myself back to life. the ticking resumes. i pray to a higher power i don’t believe in. i keep the door of the operating room open and you ask if i need help. i’m laying down on the table and i ask, can you see it? you shake your head. of course you can’t, how can you see it when you can’t even hear it. how can you hear it if you can’t even see it. it’s deafening in my ears. i lend you my ears and ask if you can hear it. you still can’t. you’re unsure if it exists. but you stitch me up and make me whole again. the ticking resumes.

one day, i finally manage to look at myself in the mirror and don’t recognize the reflection in front of me. there’s still a bomb in me, but i’ve carved myself open so many times i’ve tetrised my features back all wrong. it’s all wrong. nobody can hear the ticking and nobody can see the red wires protruding out from my skin where blue-gray veins are supposed to run and please, if you hold your breath long enough it’ll materialize in front of you. i’ve spent so long listening for it that i don’t recognize the cadence of my heart anymore. but i won’t ask for anything else now, i understand that it’s inextricable, a red string tied around my ankle. all i ask is that i know when it’ll explode. i always look at the needle when it pierces my skin. i need to know when the bomb inside of me will detonate. i thought it would have years ago, but it hasn’t yet. the countdown terrifies me more now to the point where i need to relearn how to walk because i don’t know how to take one step without trying to match my footsteps to the tick, a perfect and steady 4/4 time signature.

i swear, i’m not imagining it. please believe me. please don’t look at me like that. my body is a minefield and as soon as i locate all the explosives, i’ll be okay again.

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2. good (anticipatory) grief (june 2025)

i taste grief on my tongue when i’m the most happy. it’s not quite grief because it’s only half formed, which is strange in itself because i never do things halfway. it’s half formed because it’s anticipatory; i anticipate sadness like how you anticipate a tidal wave when the water recedes. to be honest, i thought that this was how everyone processed sadness, by overplaying a hypothetical scenario in their heads like a broken record, by pressing down all eighty eight keys of a piano until a note seemed in tune with the potential and inevitable melancholy that would follow.

i think about the other shoe dropping so much because i keep telling myself i need to be prepared, how are you going to deal with it if you’re not prepared. i think about the other shoe dropping so much that i sometimes can’t discern when it actually happens. i mourn moments that haven’t even happened yet. as if preparing myself and repeating the worst possible outcome into oblivion could lessen the blow when it actually happened. maybe it’s some masochistic need in me to make everything a glass-half-empty scenario, so it won’t feel as terrifying when something sad actually happens. either way, i let myself succumb to simulations of sadness that inevitably turns into just sadness.

my grandpa is sick and i’ve been feeling numb. we went to go see him, a man who dedicated his life to academia, who was a professor for fifty years, now someone who has a tabula rasa for a mind. i’ve been watching him slip away for a few years now, i’ve been losing him before i actually lose him. it’s the pretense of grief, the anticipation of the devastation that will happen because such is life; death exists because life exists and there always must be an equilibrium of sorts, right? at the nursing home, i locked myself in a bathroom stall and tried to manufacture the feeling before i felt it, anticipating it like some earthquake simulation. but i’ve never really lost anyone close to me and i imagine that trying to know exactly how it feels is exactly how a blind person feels trying to imagine color.

i saw him and i felt a muted ache in my chest. but that was all. i worried that i repress my emotions so much on a day to day basis that i genuinely won’t be able to properly grieve when he passes away. i told my best friend this and he said that i can’t expect to immediately feel things, that big life events like this take time to feel and heal from and maybe that’s a beautiful thing. “that’s where you and i are different, i think that’s horrendous. we should be able to process and get over things immediately,” i replied.

i teared up when my baby sister cried. i held her hand tightly.

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3. give me back my girlhood (september 2024)

(trigger warning: sexual assault)

half of the time when i think about that night, i feel like i'm making it all up in my head. like an alternate dimension has painted this fantasy in my head that’s stuck to my brain, like the dusty remnants of a year old sticky label, impossible to remove. it feels illogical to think that this is something that happened to me, not something i heard around like some urban legend. maybe i've dissociated so much and tried to distance myself from it that i feel like if i recounted what he did in court, it would feel like i was perjuring myself. my most irrational fear was that he would sue me for defamation and he would play a tape he had secretly recorded of me, and it would look like i was enjoying it because i didn't say no loudly or as many times as i could.

if our cells regenerate every seven years, it means that i'll be free of him in two years, there will be no physical remnant of him left on my body that i feel like everyone can see like a nineties blacklight party. and then maybe i can stop feeling like a fucking centrifuge just spinning and spinning until i'm just pieces of a whole. but will i ever be free of him? i’m no longer nineteen, i’m grown, i’ve become a whole person ever since. and yet i’m still scared of ghosts, the way a child asks their parent to check under their bed for monsters at bedtime. ghosts that look like the shape of him. he’s everywhere, in the room i sleep in, in the bus ride to work, in the books i read. he’s haunted me for longer than i knew him. he haunts me because i feel like i am a liar, that this never happened, that he was just a guy who lived next door and we never went on a date and i never went to go and hook up with him because i thought that the worst thing he could do to me was just be insufferable.

how many minutes does it take to ruin someone’s entire life? how many minutes does it take to irrevocably change someone’s personality, the way they view life, they way they trust? the way they thought the world spun on a certain axis but it got knocked off, and now everything looks a bit tilted and a bit jaded. i sometimes think about that night in detail, trying to illustrate it in color, like a masochist. did he…or did i imagine it? i don’t think my brain is that fucked up enough to conjure up such a horrible progression of events. did he? did he really do what i think he did to me? did he actually?

i think about if there were any times i could have escaped, could have broken free before he did what he did to me. i do this like it'll help me understand why he did what he did, when not even he could probably answer it.

i remember he told me his parents were absent and that's why he was so fucked up, before he read about nihilism to me in latin because he believed that god is dead and life is meaningless, and now i too believe that alive things are dead and wonder why the price to pay for his parents’ neglect is the loss of my girlhood.