the high school harlot

it is a strange thing to be sexualized before you are even sexual.

to be called a whore before your first kiss.
to have rumors written about a version of yourself you had not even met yet.

i learned early that girlhood can be brutal in ways adulthood likes to minimize later.

people say:
“kids are mean.”

as if that fully captures the psychological violence of being a teenage girl under public evaluation.

because high school was not just math tests and football games.

it was social currency.
surveillance.
hierarchy.
performance.
punishment.

especially for girls.

one rumor could become identity overnight.

and once a girl is labeled: dramatic, slutty, attention seeking, crazy, easy, too much, people stop looking for truth and start looking for evidence that confirms the story they already decided to tell about her.

i was called things i had not even become old enough to understand.

and the irony is that many girls learn sexuality not through desire, but through accusation.

through realizing your body entered the room before you did.
through noticing people project things onto girls long before girls understand what is happening.

i think that shaped me more than i admitted for years.

because when the world tells you who you are loudly enough, eventually part of you starts performing it back.

not always consciously.
sometimes just out of exhaustion.

if everyone already assumes you are dangerous, inappropriate, dramatic, seductive, too much eventually there is a temptation to think:
fine.
then let me at least own it.

but underneath all of it i was still just a girl.

awkward.
sensitive.
hopeful.
trying desperately to be liked while pretending not to care whether i was.

and the saddest part is this:
some people never emotionally leave high school.

you see it later at thirty.
forty.
fifty.

the same cruelty.
the same gossip disguised as concern.
the same obsession with tearing women apart to feel safer inside themselves.

just with better lighting and adult vocabulary.

that part used to make me angry.

now it mostly makes me sad.

because i cannot imagine carrying that much unresolved insecurity for that many years.

and maybe this is age softening me, but i genuinely hope the girls who once weaponized judgment against other girls found healing somewhere along the way.

i hope life expanded them.
i hope love deepened them.
i hope motherhood, heartbreak, loss, joy, failure, survival… whatever it took… taught them gentleness.

because being a teenage girl is already hard enough without learning other girls are watching you like predators waiting for blood in the water.

and maybe that is why i became so protective of women later.

because i know what it feels like to be turned into a story before you ever got the chance to introduce yourself.