Lessons from the Other Side of 21: Failing To Imagine Others Complexly

In this new column, a recent college grad getting her footing in the world gives advice to her teenage self.

Dear JJ:

“A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.” Laugh all you want, but by the time you get to my age, the backlash against Titanic will have faded and you will be free to enjoy the movie with only the tiniest degree of irony. (The real irony being, of course, that you missed the phenomenon altogether because you were 12 years old when it was released in the theatres. Our parents wouldn’t let you watch PG-13 movies until you were 13. 13! You were six months away! The unfairness of it all! And no, you still haven’t forgiven them.) I only mention this because yes, a woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets, or at least, it seems that way to all the boys you know.

By the time you turn 21, you will have been called “mysterious” by no less than three different boys. This is by turns flattering, annoying, and utterly baffling. It isn’t as though you play coy or hard to get; in fact, your feelings are about as transparent as a plane of glass. The truth is you find boys just as mysterious as they apparently find you.

Of course, you have a few distinct disadvantages when it comes to navigating the miscommunication between sexes. First: You went to an all-girls’ high school and therefore have no idea how to act around boys your own age. Second: You’ve never had an appropriate crush in your life (seriously) and therefore have no idea how to act around boys your own age. Third: You are a total, complete, utter, and absolute nerd and therefore have no idea how to act around boys your own age. You are a hopeless case. But it’s all right; the first two issues have cures: time and opportunity. It’s the nerd aspect that makes you an unfathomable creature.

It isn’t as though you lack social skills. Your parents did send you to finishing school—I mean, cotillion—after all. But you have always lived in a rich, insular world of your own making, populated with comic books, Sailor Moon, Tolkien’s Elvish languages, cult science fiction movies, I Want To Believe posters, Saturday morning cartoons, Decemberists albums, Libertines music videos, Harry Potter midnight parties, gay glam rock films, emo Livejournal entries, and obsessive fan behavior (fanart, fanfiction, fancrafts) of your multiple and varied fandoms. This makes you knowledgeable on a number of topics: from Anglo-Saxon poetry to the lyric tradition of rockstars, and every time you open your mouth to reveal another facet of you, a boy calls you “mysterious”.

“Oh,” he says, seeing the power ring on your finger. “I didn’t think you were the type of girl who even knew what The Green Lantern Corps is. I can never figure you out; you’re so mysterious.”

Because Heaven forbid a girl have actual interests outside…whatever it is girls are supposed to like. Makeup? Shopping? Relationships? Girly things? (You don’t learn how to be a girly-girl until much later. It takes you even longer to realize that being a girly-girl is okay, but that’s a letter for another day.) You missed this chapter on flirting in all-girls’ school, in which you are apparently supposed to capitulate your interests to flatter his, or worse, in which you hide the spark of who you truly are in order to cater to expectations. Why can’t boys understand that you are who you are because you just are? There’s no game you’re playing, no artifice, no carefully cultivated image to maintain.