Girl, Not Yet A Woman

My conversation with a 17-year-old friend...

P.C. Leyre Del Rio

"I listened to that interview you did with that professor," your friend giggles over FaceTime. She is 17 years old, 12 years younger than you. She does not mention the subject of the interview (female orgasms), but you immediately know which podcast episode she is talking about. She continues,

"My friend just got her first boyfriend too, and she was like, "He never does anything for me," and I was like, "That's so weird." And I couldn't figure out why. And then I remembered I had listened to that interview you did. My boyfriend's really good at it. It just seems so...normal."

You let her words sink in. You realize that at 17, this girl's definition of "normal" is a world where her male, probably-acne-ridden partner eats her out and makes her cum. You think of the pubic hair-phobic man-child in his mid-thirties you were sleeping with recently. He is a lost cause, you now admit. But the young people. The people who are coming of age in the TikTok era. They're doing things differently.

You finish the conversation as you do with every 15 to 21-year-old girl you come across: What are you doing for your birth control? You have taken it upon yourself to ask this question. She tells you she's got birth control already. You assure her that it's very easy for you to send her $60 for Plan B if she ever needs it. You reassure her that she can always call you if she needs anything, ever.

After you finish the conversation, you feel emotional. You're not sure why. You pause, try to collect yourself, and journal as you hypothesize:

1. You love this girl in a way that someone might love their own daughter. But you don't have children of your own, so you can't even verify that. You care for her as she's about to take a gap year to travel the world, and she might not want to go to college. You realize that she is so young and vulnerable and impressionable and on the cusp of everything. There's an intensity about that. You felt her excitement radiating out at you across time zones and phone screens.

2. Later, you wonder if you're emotional because you love her unconditionally, whether or not she goes to college or whatever she ends up doing with her life. This is the kind of unconditional love you never felt in your childhood or teenage years—not from the adults, not from yourself, even. There was always some expectation of achievement. You decide you will give her the unconditional love that you never had. You wonder if you did enough when talking to her to break that cycle.

3. You see yourself in her. You wanted to jump in and tell her to be careful, but then you remembered that you took the train from Moscow to Beijing when you were 19. That young wanderlust. It makes you realize just how much you have changed in the last 12 years. You've moved countries twice. You've lived in five major cities. You've graduated. You've held down jobs. You've paid rent. All that life you have lived. You feel the immensity of that.

4. Part of what you are feeling seems to be edging on that debilitating nostalgia. You realize that all the time we are given is all the time we are given. You repeat that to yourself. You remember that to be alive, in and of itself, is a gift. You remember Kurt Vonnegut’s words your grandmother always likes to quote you,

"So it goes."

5. In your world of individual adulthood, your young friend reminds you that you might have something to offer. At 29, you're not a solo cog contributing to the economy. You might have something to teach someone else. Or at least stop them from fucking up in the same ways that you fucked up. You think about it more, and you decide that more orgasms for teenage girls is a positive thing. That's something you can get behind. Perhaps this is what makes all the pain worth it. The empathy drowns you in another flurry of tears. Why are you always crying and then writing about it? The people are going to get bored. You accept they may get bored, but you can't help it, and you'll keep writing about it anyway.

6. In a way, perhaps, you realize you wrote that orgasm piece from a place of pain. You took your pain and all those times having sex when you were staring up at the ceiling, and you thought: Maybe things could be different? There must have been some pain there when only 3 of the 40 men you've slept with have ever given you an orgasm. But perhaps that pain was all worth it if a 17-year-old girl is getting her boyfriend to eat her out now. Perhaps we will never have world peace, but you imagine that one more orgasm bends the arc of the universe in a slightly better direction. In a tiny, tiny way. Perhaps that is how we are supposed to help people. Take our pain, pick it apart, and serve it in stories and articles and organizations to try to make a change. Our suffering is needless. Our suffering is senseless and undeserved because not everything happens for a reason. And yet, part of that suffering is worth it if you end up using it to help someone else.

"Don't fancy yourself a martyr," the critical part inside of you blurts out. Not all great art or helpful things have to be born out of suffering, surely? But maybe suffering is the only way to know that you can empathize, see, witness, and try to help another person in their pain. Maybe suffering is what makes life worth it. The orgasms, you know, and your friend listening to that interview. It's healing you in some way, too. It's got to be. You wouldn't be crying if it wasn't.

It opens a window in a way. It's asking you a lot of questions. Am I showing up in the world in the way that I want to be? Are there problems I can write about that might help other people that I'm not currently writing about? This, you have found, is how you do your best work. Your pieces on trauma. Your piece on finding your way in the world. There are hills that people die on. There are crazy levels of suffering that people endure to save another. You get to choose whether your suffering lives, breathes, and dies in vain or not.

If all else fails, remember the words of Julia Cameron:

"We are much larger than we know. We are much more spirited than we know. We are much more spiritual than we know...One of the things that we don't acknowledge is the care that was taken to create each one of us."

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