Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [78]
Monica pushed herself—to speak in class and to smile in the halls. It was scary because sometimes she was rewarded, other times scorned. In spite of her talents and intellect, she had feelings like everyone else. Rejection stung. I encouraged her to focus on her successes instead of her failures and to view her occasional rejections as stones in the path to a healthy social life. She learned to walk around them.
Monica joined the writing and political clubs at her school. One day she announced to me that she was “tearing up the Young Democrats with her political satire.” Another day she said she’d been elected secretary of the Writers’ Club. “It’s a job reserved for terminal geeks,” she said proudly.
I encouraged her to think of boys not as dates, but as friends. Monica selected a sensitive poet from her writing club. She shyly tried a joke on him and he laughed. He began joking with her. After a few weeks he offered to let her see his poetry.
At the same time that she made some friends, she remained aware that there were many students who would never give her a chance. She said, “I can see people look me over, size me up as unattractive and look away. I am not a person to them.”
Monica came in most of her sophomore year. She was a large, big-boned person who gradually became physically fit. She actually began to enjoy exercise in spite of all her predictions to the contrary.
She, like most adolescent girls who do not fit our cultural definitions of beautiful, needed a lot of support to make it through this time. Her self-esteem crumbled as she experienced taunts and rejections. Still Monica built some friendships that held. She spent time with her poet friend and a few others. She still enjoyed communicating with teenagers around the country by computer modem, but it was no longer her primary social scene. She could actually go out on Saturday nights, an experience that helped her depression enormously.
Monica had found a niche in an alien environment. She was happier, but still aware of how tough life was going to be for her. She knew that she would never be a pretty package and that many guys were intimidated by her smarts. She knew that some people were so put off by her plain appearance that they never gave her personality a chance.
She made a good adjustment to a bad situation. She didn’t deny her brightness or musical talents so that she could fit in, but she developed some skills for diffusing the tension her gifts created. She used humor to diffuse some of her pain about being chubby.
Monica was lucky in that even though the culture was hostile to her development, she had many resources of her own. Her life had exposed her to ideas not explored by popular culture—she had some perspective on her experience. Her parents were by no means agents of the culture. Both were feminists who decried the narrowness of women’s roles and their lack of public power. They did all they could to help her through adolescence—music lessons, a bicycle, new clothes and therapy. They encouraged Monica to be true to herself and resist the message that she got from peers. They knew she was wonderful.
Monica had a mild case of depression which has many manifestations. It makes some young women sluggish and apathetic, others angry and hate-filled. Some girls manifest their depression by starving themselves or carving on their bodies. Some withdraw and go deep within themselves, and some swallow pills. Others drink heavily or are promiscuous. Whatever the outward form of the depression, the inward form is the grieving for the lost self, the authentic girl who has disappeared with adolescence. There’s been a death in the family.
There are numerous ways in which this death occurs. Some may destroy their true selves in an effort to be socially acceptable. Others strive to be fully feminine and fail. They aren’t pretty enough or popular