What Makes Us Girls

by Brittany Pettibone

  What purpose could possibly be nobler or more necessary?

  If your primary dream in life is to have children and be a good mother,never let anyone convince you that your dream is inferior to that of other dreams. Motherhood is a wonderful role and you are a wonderful person for desiring it. If, at any point, you feel undervalued by the world for your choice—which will inevitably happen from time to time due to our society’s ever-declining opinion of mothers—take comfort in the millions of other good mothers around you. They know your battle and your struggle, and there will never come a day when they don’t understand the value of it.

  How To Choose Your Purpose

  So It Doesn’t Choose You

  Even when we know ourselves, choosing our purpose can be difficult if our desired path is demeaned by society. Like Sofia, perhaps we too feel pressured to adopt a certain role. Or perhaps it’s not society that’s pressuring us. Perhaps we have an overbearing family.

  When it comes to the people who are closest to us, their opinions hold greater value than the opinions of society. It can sometimes be helpful to take our loved ones’ advice. After all, they generally want what’s best for us. They want to see us succeed. They want to know we’re in a position to take care of ourselves or to be taken care of.

  If we ever find ourselves in a situation where our loved ones are objecting to our chosen purpose, the best course of action is to establish their intent. For example, we’re heading down a path that we know is causing harm to us mentally, physically and even spiritually. Our family will likely intervene with a mind to help us, to direct us towards a healthier path. It’s times like these when their advice might be worth considering.

  If, on the other hand, we want to pursue a neutral goal such as becoming an artist, but our family members don’t believe we’ll be able to support ourselves through art and are pressuring us to choose a more practical career, the choice should ultimately fall to us. We might have to work extra jobs for awhile, keeping ourselves afloat until we succeed in the art industry, but if becoming an artist is what we truly want, and if it’s what we’re skilled at, then we should try. The worst life would be one where we’re trapped in a career that we never wanted—we only chose it because it was thrust upon us by our loved ones. We might even end up blaming our loved ones for our unhappiness. Our relationships with them will never be the same.

  Ultimately, the ways in which we might stumble upon our purpose are countless. Personally, I found my purpose through isolation. During the two years I spent homeschooling, I spent most of my time alone. Once I’d managed to get comfortable in my own mind, I came to find that I enjoyed creativity and started to develop a tendency towards the arts. I painted. I drew. I even sang. But it wasn’t until the day I wrote my first poem that I knew I’d found the path I wanted to continue exploring forever.

  Depending on the types of girls we are, we might not be able to find our purpose through solitude. Perhaps we’ll have to travel the world or attend university. Whatever the solution may be, we have to at least give ourselves a period of focus, away from all distractions. Even if, in the beginning, we find that we lack confidence, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be discouraged. An initial lack of confidence is completely normal. Confidence is nothing more than “being sure of ourselves,” meaning that what will ultimately boost our confidence is firstly: choosing our purpose. And secondly: being good at our purpose.

  I’ve received a lot of advice related to choosing my purpose over the course of my life. Naturally, the best advice was always from people much older than I, people whose wisdom was born from decades of experience. While almost all of the advice I’ve received has been useful, I’ll only share the top three.

  1st Piece of Advice: Focus on Your Skills

  Choose a purpose you’re good at.

  Without skill, we’re at a higher risk of failing to advance in our chosen field. While we can develop skill in most areas if we work hard enough, sometimes it’s unrealistic. For example, you want to be a professional swimmer but can’t swim. Or you’ve spent thirty years of your life working as a lawyer and then one day wake up and decide you want to become an astronaut. One in a million people will succeed in accomplishing this, but as a general rule, it lies outside the realm of possibility.

  2nd Piece of Advice: Think Solo or Duo

  Discern whether your purpose is an individual one or a partnership.

  Most of the purposes we end up choosing will be individual ones, such as becoming a psychiatrist, a nurse or a writer. We don’t necessarily need a second person to work with us. We can succeed on our own. But other purposes, such as marriage, are inevitable partnerships. If this is the case, we need to make sure that our partner is on the same page as us. Let’s say your primary goal in life is to get married and become a mother. Is it also your boyfriend’s primary goal to get married and become a father?

  Imagine you’ve been dating your boyfriend for seven years. You’ve stuck with him through thick and thin, and even though you are now in your thirties, your boyfriend still hasn’t shown any interest in marrying you or having kids. Whenever you bring up the subject, he either directs the conversation somewhere else or outright tells you that his goals are different from your own. In this case, it’s probably best to separate, even if you love him. You can’t force another person to adopt your dreams. Trying to do so might make the person unhappy and resentful. You will also risk losing the opportunity to bring your own dreams to fruition.

  3rd Piece of Advice: Pick One (or More)

  Be open to more than one purpose.

  Of course, we do need to choose a central purpose, but there’s more than enough room for a few smaller purposes (or hobbies) on the side. For example, my main purpose will begin next year when I become a wife—and hopefully soon afterwards, a mother—but as a smaller purpose, I am a writer. Most of us will end up with multiple purposes at some point in our lives, and it might not even be through our own choice. Some of us might be forced to work an extra job to make enough money to care for ourselves or our children.

  No matter the purpose you choose, the key is to never feel forced—force breeds regret. There’s no better feeling than knowing you’ve chosen your purpose of your own accord. Then the path ahead is not only clear—it’s right. You can charge ahead without inhibitions, without the desire to stop in your tracks, to turn around and to doubtfully question the past.

  7

  “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”

  —William Blake

  When You’ve Been Betrayed

  What’s the worst physical injury you’ve ever experienced? Mine was stepping on a rusty nail while out for a jog. The nail pierced halfway through the sole of my foot. By the time I returned home, dirt and debris were lodged inside the wound and blood was leaking from my shoe. For the next week, I was unable to place pressure on my foot.

  In hindsight, I’d take the pain of stepping on a nail a thousand times over the experience of betrayal. Betrayal is the most destructive kind of wound, for more often than not, the hand that dealt it was friendly. While it’s true that enemies will likely betray us, the wounds they inflict will never be deep, for we share no bond with them. The people we love on the other hand are people we’ve allowed into our hearts. We’ve taken a risk, solely because we love them, and have entrusted them with the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. But all it takes is a single moment of weakness on their part. When this happens, when someone we love breaks our bond of trust, it’s one of the most painful experiences we can suffer.

  Unfortunately, there is no standard method of overcoming betrayal. No map exists, leading us from point A to point Z, guaranteeing that if we complete all the required steps, we will be rewarded with the “antidote of healing.” Furthermore, not all of us will respond to the same antidotes. Our minds are as unique as thumbprints. Methods of healing that help us might prove ineffective for others. Some might heal by receiving emotional support from family an
d friends; some might heal by seeking counsel from a therapist or a priest; others might heal by focusing their attention outside of themselves, working towards new goals and learning new things.

  Similar to dealing with rejection, it’s oftentimes necessary to give ourselves time to process the fact that we’ve been betrayed. Time to be sad, to be weak, to be angry and to rebuild our sense of self-worth. Of course, this doesn’t mean we have to grab a megaphone and announce to the whole world that we’ve been betrayed. To truly heal, we have to do more than acknowledge our pain; we have to face it and accept it. While striving to attain closure is sometimes the most difficult part of betrayal, without it, healing and moving on is impossible.

  Throughout my childhood, and even now, I struggled with asking others for emotional support. I had a martyr complex. My pride told me that I didn’t need help, that I could overcome every obstacle on my own. In reality, I did need others. We all do.

  My pride hindered me from coming to terms with a lot of betrayal over the course of my life, not only because I didn’t ask for help, but because I failed to deal with the pain on my own. Instead, I forced the pain into a distant room in my mind and shut the door. For a time, I was fine. Years passed after the fact—I still felt fine. But one day, an event occurred that caused my pain to resurface. The pain hit me hard, bursting to the exterior like an erupting volcano. I broke down. The worst part was that I hadn’t realized I was still harboring the pain. I hadn’t realized that I still held resentment, that I hadn’t been able to forgive. We all have our methods of coping with betrayal, but the bottom line is that this pain must be dealt with. More importantly, we must realize that we are capable of overcoming it.

  My second boyfriend, Jack, instigated the first real betrayal I experienced. Jack didn’t attend my high school, although many of the girls who did attend my high school were competing for his attention. For some reason, he chose to date me—at least publicly—over the other girls.

  I was happy, although in hindsight, I can say with certainty that I never loved Jack. I didn’t understand what love was back then. I was a naïve teenager who believed she’d grasped the world in its entirety. But the reality was that I knew nothing of human nature. I didn’t even know myself. I was only capable of superficial thoughts and infatuation.

  Jack and I only dated a few months. My family didn’t care for him, to put it lightly. They thought he was a bad influence. They were concerned that he didn’t share our religious views and they thought I was too young to be dating. I didn’t care. I was too angry to take my family’s advice, as I thought they hadn’t even given him a chance. I thought the side of him they claimed to have seen was false. I believed only I knew his true side.

  A few months later, I traveled to the East Coast to visit my twin sister at her boarding school in New York. I recall the trip being very cathartic for both of us. We hadn’t spoken much in the months leading up to my visit, and part of the reason was due to my relationship with Jack.

  Upon my return home, one of my friends called me and told me he’d seen Jack kissing another girl at a party over the weekend. Naturally, I was devastated. I distinctly recall having been unable to conceive of betrayal before this moment. I considered betrayal as a shock-tactic designed to make songs and movies more dramatic.

  While betrayal is never easy, the first betrayal generally hits us the hardest. And since it’s rare that we’ll ever come to know the state of mind and motives of the person who betrayed us, we’re often doomed to have one-way conversations in our own heads—conversations that can result in us blaming ourselves for the wrongdoings of others. After all, we were the ones who allowed the person to get close to us, which must mean we’re a poor judge of character, right?

  Wrong. Unless there are reliable signs or even evidence that a person has a tendency towards betrayal—for example, a history of cheating or constantly flirting with other girls in our presence—how could we be expected to know? Yes, we also might be guilty of making mistakes in our relationships. We might have done things to push our boyfriends away. But this is never an excuse for betrayal.

  To this day, I’ll never understand why I agreed to take Jack back, but I did. It’s not the fact that I don’t believe those of us who betray can change and become better people, it’s the fact that I was aware Jack hadn’t changed. Two weeks later, my suspicion was confirmed. He betrayed me with a girl at my high school. She wasn’t a close friend, more of an acquaintance, but it was worse than the first betrayal because I could now put a face to the person he’d betrayed me with. Even worse, I had to see her every day at school.

  It was then I decided enough was enough. Jack wanted to stay together and even promised me he’d change, but I was determined. It took three long months of self-examination, of forcing myself to face the questions of who I truly was, who I wanted to be and whether I was worth anything at all, before I was able to put the past behind me. In a way though, I didn’t get over Jack’s betrayal until many years later. Not because my wounds needed years to heal, but because I’d failed to confide in anyone, much less acknowledge my own pain. I simply stowed it away and continued on. This was a huge mistake.

  Another huge mistake I made in regards to coping with betrayal was that, at various points in my life, I allowed one person’s betrayal to destroy my trust in everyone. I stopped giving people the benefit of the doubt and started placing a broad blanket of mistrust over all. I figured that since people were eventually going to betray me, I could avoid their betrayals by never giving them an opportunity to get close to me in the first place. This mentality condemned me to years of surface-level friendships and relationships. I missed out on the depth and sincerity that those who choose to trust are oftentimes rewarded with, and I hugely regret this.

  In this particular case, my decision to mistrust was a product of fear rather than pride. Being a political YouTuber, I still grapple with this fear today. Political YouTube is a vast network of commentators, activists and journalists, many of which are in contact behind the scenes—not because we all agree with one another, but because it helps to maintain some kind of solidarity in the face of the internet’s ever-increasing censorship. At the very least, most of us speak to one another on occasion. Some of us are even close friends. The problem with political YouTube is that many people are willing to throw each other under the bus to preserve their careers and reputations; to become richer and more famous; to be accepted by the mainstream political scene; and also for simpler reasons like dislike and jealousy.

  That said, it will likely come as no surprise that many people in my political network have, at one point or another, betrayed my confidence, spread false rumors about me, and so on. Not just me, but countless others have also either betrayed or been betrayed. What makes trust particularly risky for political YouTubers is the fact that we have the mainstream media relentlessly circling us like a pack of rabid dogs, employing various tactics to glean insider secrets and gossip. More than anything, they want to see us destroyed, to turn us against one another and watch us stomp each other out. This is why, whenever I come across people in our political network who have made the decision not to trust anyone, I understand their reasoning. However, I don’t always agree with it.

  What is a life without trust? It’s a safer life, yes. But it’s also a shallower and more disconnected life. Even worse, it’s a loveless life, for there can be no love without trust. Choosing to trust, despite the chances of betrayal, will always be the greatest risk, but it will oftentimes also reap the greatest reward.

  When You’ve Been the Betrayer

  “Did you start a rumor about Katie Muller?” your mother asks. She’s standing in the family room, a cellphone in one hand, an expression of disappointment tightening the smooth lines of her face. “I just got off the phone with Mrs. Muller. Katie’s been crying all night.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” you insist. “I’ve had wayworse rumors spread about me.”

  “You might’ve been a vic
tim in the past,” your mother agrees, “but that doesn’t make you a victim regardless of the situation.”

  You scoff, insulted. You sense your mother is trying to help, but even so, you can’t help but feel judged. Almost every single person you’ve allowed to get close to you has ended up betraying you in some way. Your mother has no idea how deeply and how repeatedly you’ve been hurt. Not to mention, why should you be nice to others if others aren’t nice to you?

  “You can’t spend your whole life being a victim,” your mother continues. “Human nature isn’t perfect, which means that everyone, including the best people, are eventually going to let you down…not necessarily in a big way, but at the very least, in small ways. Even if you’ve suffered betrayals, the injustice you’ve faced doesn’t make it okay for you to switch roles and become the betrayer. I’m really disappointed in you.”

  You leave the family room, slamming the door behind you. Your mother’s advice is like trying to swallow a spoonful of cod-liver oil. You don’t want to accept it. You’re tempted to use her example of “human imperfection” as an excuse for your mistake. You might say something along the lines of, “I’m flawed, so you can’t expect me to be perfect all the time.”

  A bad girl isn’t someone who lacks perfection, but someone who lacks remorse. If we have no regret for our betrayal and if we have no intention of attempting to make amends, we disqualify ourselves from the decent majority. Those among the decent majority are aware that, when guilty of betrayal, we are oftentimes required to pay a twofold debt.

  The first part of the debt relates to responsibility. If we decide to take responsibility for our wrongdoings, we won’t be allowed to contrive excuses or blame others. We have to admit to our errors and apologize. Unfortunately, there might be extra, unforeseen prices such as loss that we have to deal with along the way. For example, we betray a friend’s trust, and she no longer wants to be our friend as a result. Even if it feels unfair, we have to accept this loss.