I'm Still the Girl Who Won't Get in the Water
My daughter had friends over this weekend.
Thirteen and fourteen-year-olds. Eight of them, loud, everywhere, eating everything in my house. One minute they’re playing hide and seek in the dark like actual children. Shrieking. Running. Completely unself-conscious.
Twenty minutes later, we’re at the pool, and one of them has spotted a boy.
And just like that, the children are gone.
The posture changes. Someone adjusts her top. Someone else laughs a little too loud at something that wasn’t that funny. They are performing now. For an audience of one boy who probably doesn’t notice any of it.
I watched the whole thing from my chair and thought: nothing about this ever stops.
The part that got me wasn’t the boy.
It was the insecurity. The specific shape of it. How differently it showed up depending on the girl.
One got loud and performed confidence.
One got small. Pulled her towel up. Decided suddenly she wasn’t getting in the water.
One looked to my daughter before she did anything. She laughed when she laughed, moved when she moved. Outsourced her own instincts to someone she trusted to have better ones.
I’ve seen all three of those people at dinner parties. In boardrooms. At cocktail hours. The boys do this too. They just perform it differently.
The insecurity doesn’t go away. It just gets a more sophisticated delivery.
I keep thinking about the one who got small.
She’s not small. I’ve watched her all day. She’s funny and quick and has opinions she doesn’t know are worth having yet.
She just doesn’t know that.
I’m not her. I have gotten in, repeatedly. I have the receipts. Six books and a newsletter I show up to every Friday. I know how to do the work.
But there are pools I’m still circling. Bigger ones. Louder ones. Ones where more people are watching. And I keep finding very reasonable, very sophisticated reasons why now isn’t quite the right time.
That’s not strategy. It’s the towel.
What's the pool you're still circling? Forward this to the person who needs to get in the water.