Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If there was any creature in American culture more derided than the young girl... I know people will argue with me about that, but everything girls are into gets ridiculed. I have a lot of compassion in my heart for girls in their teens and twenties who are going through this particular passage, because I get it. It makes sense!
I definitely think being a young girl, there's a time where - like when you're in middle school or when you first start liking boys - you don't really feel comfortable. You remember that time when you first got your period, or when your boobs started coming in, that you were like, 'This is weird.' You have to grow into yourself.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and in spite of what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of 'The Brady Bunch.' Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Marcia Brady skating down the street saying 'hi' to everyone, whether they knew me or not.
There's a certain trope in young adult fiction. A young girl gets cancer and becomes this radiant person who's a fountain of insight. Everyone who encounters her is changed for the better. That doesn't happen all the time. The whole thing is much more difficult to process. Adults have trouble with it, so why shouldn't we expect teens to?
When I first read Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl,' I saw for the first time that a girl could be a writer and that it had something to do with survival and with ethics and fighting against evil. I admired her, though her diary remained terrifying and mysterious to me. She was a character in a real fairy tale - fairy tales are brutal.
To the young girl who fails to see opportunities around her: Awaken the intellectual curiosity within you. Go on, search for those opportunities and chase after them! Because when you are curious and in 'search mode,' you will meet a lot of people and learn, and when you find opportunities, you will be exhilarated rather than overwhelmed.