For most of my life, I thought female friendships were a performance.
Not the beautiful kind like poetry or ritual but the kind that required constant surveillance. Being at a girls’ convent school, I was taught this early. There were always unspoken rules. My body type didn’t fit in. I wasn’t petite, soft-spoken, or demure. I wasn’t someone who “fit” the unspoken standard of girlhood. I was too much. Too loud. Too visible. I remember female teachers chastising me not for my academics, but for how my presence “distracted” others. I remember guardians of my friends warning them not to “hang out with girls like me.” I wish they knew the damage they were doing to a growing child. But more than anything, I wish I knew then that this wasn’t what womanhood had to be.
There’s a powerful essay I read recently about toxic girlhood how many of us stay emotionally stuck in the teenage lunchroom. Watching, comparing, calculating where we stand in the social hierarchy of girl friendships. Wanting to be “the only one,” the “favorite,” the “chosen one.” How some of our female friendships are born from wounds rather than wholeness. We police one another with a smile. We punish with silence. We mirror each other to the point of psychic fusion. I’ve been there. I’ve done it. I’ve chased validation by playing the chameleon. I’ve melted into insecurity when someone I loved grew close to another woman.
But I’ve grown.
And perhaps more importantly, I’ve begun the slow work of growing up. Emotionally. Spiritually. Archetypally.
I’m beginning to understand that true womanhood isn’t about being in control or being the center of someone’s universe. It’s about stepping out of the psychic script of the “maiden” that our media feeds us the thin, desirable, emotionally reactive girl who never really becomes. It’s about creating space for others to grow and holding that space with grace.
I now cherish low-maintenance female friendships. The kind that let you breathe. That don’t demand daily check-ins or proof of loyalty. Friendships rooted in depth, not dependence. I am surrounded today by women who uplift, not surveil. Who support me without comparing trauma stories or matching aesthetics. And I see my younger self in this too how I longed for sisterhood but only knew how to perform it. How I mistook proximity for intimacy. How I needed to be seen as the “cool girl” by men, dismissing other girls along the way.
Now I reclaim my place with women. For women.
I think of the essay’s closing lines: “No more hiding behind critiques of the patriarchy while we sabotage our own. We’re the ones who have to stop this madness. And we do it by growing up. By tending to what’s been forgotten.”
I’m ready to do that tending. I’m ready to throw away the shackles of my convent-school trauma, of adult friendships built on adolescent wounds. I’m ready to remember what real, sacred feminine connection looks like.
Because I believe in women.
I believe in the women I’ve become friends, who make space for my silence, who never punish me for changing. And I believe in the woman I’m still becoming. One who doesn’t seek to be chosen, but simply to be. Whole, alive, and finally
And if I could write a small poem for all the girls still finding their way back to themselves, it would be this:
to the girls who watch,
who whisper, who wonder
may you grow out of longing
into belonging.
may your softness no longer ache
to be smaller.
may your love find women
who rise with you, not above you.
and may you never again
mistake surveillance for sisterhood.
