I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This [But I'm Going to Anyway]

by Chelsea Devantez

Grace once overheard someone in the grocery store calling them drunks and sluts, and she marched right over in her cheetah-print leggings and said, “Thank you for noticing.”

She hugged me and offered what she genuinely thought was a word of comfort: “Don’t worry, men will fuck anything.”

But Ashley had a secret weapon that stopped me in my let’s-wear-matching-sweaters-to-the-party! tracks. She had something in spades that I did not: boundaries. These foreign, unfamiliar things were established really early on in our relationship when, late one night at a bar after class, Ashley got up to go home, and I did that drunken thing where you squeal, “Nooooo! Stayyyy!” She looked back at me so centered, so grounded, and firmly said, “I need to be able to leave when I’m ready, or I won’t want to hang out with you at all.”

there is another Young Me reading this, I hope she learned that humiliation has many faces, and no one is actually strong, they are just putting one foot forward, and that alone is enough.

If nothing else, I hope she knows that normal is a vicious prank, and likability is a slow poison, and that she should forever be too much and never make herself less.