Simone

Modesty. Why am I so obsessed with it?

I know patriarchy has a lot do with it: Telling women never to speak of themselves and all. And I know patriarchy has a lot to do with the Puritanical roots of American society.

Maybe I should be living in some early American Puritanical society then, where modesty is forced upon citizens with threats of jail time and public shaming. It’s not non-gray clothing that bothers me, I just hate when people flatter themselves. I wish every person had a level of humility just shy of internalized self-hatred. The world would be a better place.

Paired with my obsession with modesty, is my sense of normality. This weekend I saw The Martian, a film in which Hollywood hunk Matt Damon aka fictional astronaut Mark Watney ends up trapped on Mars for a few hundred “sol.” Damon/Watney’s situation is incredible because of how high the stakes are, and because of how significant his predicament is to himself, NASA, and, well, the entire human race. When his crew leaves him on Mars thinking he’s dead, he becomes the first person to ever exist on another planet alone. When he miraculously begins growing crops in one of his habitation chambers, he becomes the first person to colonize space. When he breaks an international treaty while following maritime law, he somehow becomes a pirate, too. But aside from snippy quips made to his video diary, his situation never seems to really resonate with or affect him. That’s not faulty filmmaking, it’s human nature. It’s my own nature.

Obviously, I’m not stuck on Mars. I’m not colonizing it, or practicing piracy to escape from it, either. But, I deeply underestimate, and in some situations, outright ignore, the importance and impact of various happenings in my life. I’m a teenage girl with an amazing role at Rookie, who never feels the need to tell anyone about it, because it all seems very normal to me. Rookie has been a personal bible to me since a very young age, and I’d always dreamed of becoming a contributor. When I became one, I was stunned for a bit, but soon those feelings were replaced by fears I’d drive my editor insane with my increasingly late submissions, or that certain boys would read certain pieces concerning them.

It wasn’t until this week, when I went to a release party for the fourth and final Yearbook, where I was ogled by my friend (who is equally if not more established) for being allowed to walk up to the contributors’ section, and saw my own written works printed on page 287, with my own printed name written above, seeing Tavi Gevinson read, feet away from me, that I realized, Hey, this is a big deal. I’m a part of something important. In this sense, my not wanting to tell people about my role at Rookie is just as much about not wanting to seem boastful as it is about forgetting how lucky and grateful I am.

Life’s been coming at me fast lately. I am a teenage girl experiencing new and important things every day. But I rarely open up to my friends, or my mom about how I’m feeling or what’s going on in my life. I know I should. The things I will experience and decisions I will make in the coming years are once in a lifetime opportunities, firsts which can never be first-ed again. It just seems that all of these experiences and opportunities are so normal, so unworthy of thought, and feeling, and energy. I keep everything inside because I don’t want to talk about myself, and because I don’t want to make things a bigger deal than they need to be.

The advancement of the human race is not dependent upon my decisions, but personally, I’m on my own Mars. I have to make sense of it all. I have to talk about it more. I have to praise myself more. ♦