Today is the first day of the rest of my life, I think proudly, like I do whenever I’m paying close enough attention. It could all change today if I start. Start what? 

Today it’s writing. I hope this one sticks. I’ve liked writing for as long as I can remember. I write random little thoughts I have, I try to world build and make characters, I try to write stories, I used to write fan fiction, and before all that, I sat at an unnamed word processor at a young age, starting a thousand would-be YA science fiction novels about a girl who was not like other girls (it was the 2000s).

In my defense, I stand by that I was not like other girls. The adage has gotten a bad rep recently, and for good reason. Not-like-other-girls girls were palatable misogyny prancing about in female empowerment’s makeup. Though they would never wear makeup, of course, they were naturally pretty and besides, who has the time? They were not interested in girly things, because as we all used to know, girly things were uncool. So the not-like-other-girls girls bemoaned their girly counterparts, and added poison in the well. 

But being not like other girls was that particular zeitgeist’s way of being special. And everybody wants to be special, especially as kids, when you usually get to be special for something you don’t have to work for and totally outside of your control. So, many of us wanted to be not-like-other-girls girls, no matter how gauche it seems to say now. 

But unlike you all, who just wanted to satisfy some base instinct, I actually wasn’t like other girls. How you ask? Was I a ferocious reader, or a tomboy, or overtly willing to get dirty, like in all the stories, mine in particular? Yes actually, but those are not my qualifications. I was not like other girls because I was 70 pounds heavier and 5-8 inches taller than other girls. I was ten toes down in the 99th percentile at the doctor’s office until I was 14. (Sadly I am now just a normal height, slightly overweight adult, which really isn’t fair at all). I distinctly remember going to a basketball game where one of the opposing team’s moms claimed I must be older than the other children I was playing against, making a fuss about if I was held back a grade or two (rude) and insisting I was “not like the other girls”! And I wasn’t. The other girls would hang all 75 pounds of themselves off my arms and I would keep getting rebounds. Checkmate, lady. 

I have never seen 2017’s Tall Girl, but I heard enough about it on the internet to know that the plights we tall children faced are regarded as but a few good natured drops in the ostracization bucket, but it’s the experience I had, so it’s the one I talk about. For what it’s worth, I remember, while in the middle of emotionally coming out to my best friend Sally, saying “aren’t I weird enough?” And us cracking up laughing. It held weight at the time. 

And so it was this oversized, dormant sexual deviant sitting at a Macintosh computer, typing about a girl -not like other girls- that didn’t eat salad and played football, and her being picked on by pretty skinny girls wearing pink and trying too hard. I’ve never met those girls, but they appear to exist in one form or another for all of us, eternally judging and underestimating, waiting for a punchline to finish them off for good. (It never comes. We never finish that story; we’re children.)

These days, I have found a fabulous not-like-other-girls day job, in electrical engineering. Making PCBs. Don’t worry about it. I grew up at the perfect age to be a female engineer. When I was young, (again, early 2000s) it was peak girls-in-STEM propaganda. I grew older and I was good at a bunch of school subjects, but I was special because I was good at STEM (and a girl). While I always liked it enough, I look back now and think I liked feeling special for being good at math more than I ever liked math. But being an engineer is more about not being an idiot than it is about math, and that, frankly, doesn’t make you not-like-other-girls at all. 

Hopefully, with a little effort, I will keep writing going. I want to do it, for real. It draws me in more than my day job, though I certainly romanticized that well enough before I started actually working in the field too. But I’ve always loved writing, and reading, no matter how many other girls did it. And I believe I would be happier to leave a little art behind. I think about that sometimes, now, in my old age (27) – what the echoes of me when I am gone will say. Personally, I care more about stories than I do about tech. And I want to reach out one day to others who feel the same — girls (and everybody else) like me.