Jadyn Right’s Reviews > Does Anyone Else Feel This Way?: Essays on Conquering the Quarter-Life Crisis > Status Update

Juliet got engaged recently, to her high school sweetheart. I found out on Instagram, which is how I find out most things about her these days. This is how it is, and that is okay. As I looked at the pictures of her earnest smile, a strange memory stirred inside of me—a remembering of picking out our engagement rings at the age of ten, planning to marry the ones that got away and boys we don’t even know anymore.

Men spend a good deal of time reducing female friendship to silly and meaningless, citing women to be “so dramatic” and “so catty” and “so bitchy.” It is my belief that friendship for non–cis men is cavernous and bottomless and just deeper. Reason being, for non-men, friendship is a necessity for our survival in a patriarchal world. It is no wonder we have made and lost more friends than they have.

Friendship is taught to us through nursery rhymes and storybooks and cliché quotes. Good friends are like stars; you don’t always see them, but you know they’re always there. Make new friends but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold. True friends will be there no matter what. Girl Scouts sold me the idea that my friends at eight years old would be my friends for life.

To lose a friend is to lose a thousand reflections of your own eyes, a road map back home even when you think home doesn’t exist. To lose a friend is to lose a person, one of very few, who is only in your life because they truly like your company—not for sex or for blood or for work—but because they see you, because they have decided their world is brighter with you in it. Because you see them back.

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I pretended to be fine through every heartbreak. I pretended to be fine for semesters, and sometimes even years. I am used to being the girl that is fine, and I excel at it too.

Girls need to be small. Girls need to be quiet. Girls need to be obedient and girls need to have their shit together. Girls need to survive, and survival is contingent on doing all sorts of things that almost kill you, but there’s the key word . . . almost. Starve yourself to fit into the jeans so you can wear the jeans and post the jeans and everyone will know you have those cool, cute jeans.

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