Tala

By Tala Alfoqaha

Dear Older Tala, 

Hi! It’s your seventh-grade self! I love Aeropostale, low-rise skinny jeans, and glitter eyeshadow. Here’s my question: How do I retain a strong sense of self amidst this ongoing stream of existential confusion and contradiction? How do I resist the desire to succumb to all the coercive forces around me, a young woman growing up in a consumerist and commercialized world where female bodies are both shamelessly commodified and shamefully covered, and remain true to myself when I don’t even know who that self is? Does self-doubt ever cease? Will Mom ever let me buy the joggers with the word “ABERCROMBIE” monogrammed onto the ass? 

xoxo, 

soccergirl7 :p

Dear soccergirl7, 

The short answers to your questions are: not sure, not sure, think so, yes (bad move, Mom). The long answer is: I like to think that the coercion becomes more manageable as we age. Our awareness grows that we are, in some sense, beholden to both benevolent and damaging, consistent and conflicting expectations about what femininity should look like, yet I’m coming to the realization that we’ll never be able to fully extricate ourselves from the tangled web spun by societies and cultures and markets. But maybe we don’t need to do so to find ourselves. I don’t know if I believe in unwaveringly confident, blind intuition—if I have one, it’s been awfully indecisive these past 20 years—but I do believe in allowing our sense of contentment to guide us. So buy those Abercrombie pants. You’ll regret them in eight years, but for now, I know they’ll make you feel good. 

Tala Alfoqaha