There’s this girl I know. I don’t like her much; she’s not my kind of person. She’s bubblegum, empty-headed and wears way too much eyeliner for a girls’ school. She spends a lot of her time checking out her ass in the corridor mirrors and talking about vacant, meaningless things. I look at her sometimes and wonder how on earth she can be so perky all the time, how someone can actually be that shallow and never think about the deeper meanings in life. Other times, I just shake my head and let it pass, because I know she’s a lost case. No doubt about it.

But then I was told she wasn’t always like that. I was told there was a time, back in the ancient recesses of memory, when she had promise, when her head wasn’t yet filled with talk of air and fading glitter. Back then it was she who was ostracised for her looks and lack of interest in all that was shallow, kept at a condescending distance by those who she now considers friends. As ‘they’ all say, if you can’t beat them, join them – so she did, and became the person she is now. It’s such a shame, I thought at the time, such a shame that she turned out like this.

Then I learnt about her mother. Oh, her mother, and I begin to feel real empathy. This person I know has been brought up in a household stuck in a time warp of the fifties, where the qualities of a good housewife are prioritised above those of a dynamic, freethinking individual. It’s really quite sad that here, in this age and society, there is still a girl out there who is being told things like growing too tall will make you less attractive to members of the opposite sex, and that there is no future for women except to grow up and marry some so-called suitable man. Can you imagine being brought up like that? Being an impressionable child with hopes and aspirations for the future, and then being told there is no future but for one of childrearing and submissiveness? All I know is I am forever grateful that I wasn’t born into a household like that. When I look at this girl now, I can almost find it in my heart to feel sorry for her and her lost dreams.

And do you want to know who she is? Well, she’s the one who I call Ditz.

0Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home