Hell is a Teenage Girl

It didn’t happen. I got accepted into my dream school but there was some hidden financial form and they said the fact I didn’t fill it out meant I couldn’t get any financial aid.

So now I’m going to a school I hate which is about two hours from my hometown— two hours is not far enough, I’m expected to come home for my family’s sake every few weeks.

When I went up to New York to visit schools, I cried because it was so amazing. I loved it so much. And now I’m going to college in Iowa.

At orientation, the demographic was about the same as it was in my high school. Mainly, the girls were the type of girl you’d see in Bama Rush. The few alt people I met weren’t “cool” alt, they were more “middle school GSA” alt, which was fine.

My roommate couldn’t have made it any clearer that she hates my style and finds it weird. She called my decorations demonic because they looked to much like tarot cards.

All this, and I’m still going to be thousands of dollars in debt when I graduate. I may never pay it back. And this was my cheapest option.

I think Society™ underestimates the power of a name to make someone feel bad (or good) about themself. Like I’ve been seeing a bunch of TikToks recently about how girls heard someone call their flat-chestedness “fashion boobs” and they immediately stopped feeling insecure.

Part of the appeal of this term is that it isn’t inherently sexual, like many of the other terms attributed to breasts in general, and nor is it demeaning. It reminds me of when I first heard about “hip dips” and felt disappointed, but then someone else called them “violin hips” and said Marilyn Monroe had them too, and I immediately felt much better about myself.

There’s something very relieving about a non-sexual term which still attributes value and beauty to the recipient.

A lot of large-chested people in the comments of “fashion boobs” video lament about how they feel like they always look trashy when they wear the clothes they like, because their breasts ruin every outfit. They feel like a whore. And I wonder if those people would still feel the same if there was a widely used term to describe large breasts that didn’t sound like a name that a fetish-ridden man coined (I’m looking at you, “calcium cannons.” Eugh.)