I’m a straight, white, cisgender, 20-year-old woman. Nothing else considered, that puts me in the list of top 3 easiest lives possible. I’m not here to complain about an attachment to my privilege; I’m simply here to critique a facet that has come attached.
Stereotypes are real. Lots of them are very very harmful, but for a Midwestern hetero WASP girl they don’t do as much damage. We like pumpkin spice lattes. We scream when we see a dog. We wear leggings and huge shirts and act like it’s some act of societal defiance. We think that we’re the first people ever to realize how smart The Office is.
A lot of the time, these sort of generalizations makeup the “basic white girl starter pack” (as can be observed by this very meta “starter pack starter pack”).
Nobody likes being defined by a generalization, no matter how harmless it might be. I’m a Frappucino-drinking, legging-wearing, Michael Scott-quoting kinda gal, but I also think there’s a lot more to me than that. I worry (more than I should) that I come off as generic and boring to new people that I meet.
I’ve recently come into contact with a phenomenon called “local Twitter.” It’s kind of hard to define, but topics on local Twitter might include:
-Dreaming of being a suburban soccer mom
-Target being your personal mecca
-Wanting to go back to a time in which you were never alive but was significantly worse for women, just for the fashion
-Any Tweet of a photo that is captioned “a date like this > > >”
-Noah Centineo
For a long time, I indulged in ridiculing this genre of social media, and people. I considered myself an “I’m not like other girls” sort of girl, which is campy and laughable in and of itself. See, for example, THIS starter pack.
As is the case in many, worse stereotypes, there’s no way you can win. So I stopped trying, and stopped making fun of other people for trying.
Who cares if what you love is what people expect of you? There’s a lot of other things about you that people don’t expect of you, too. What makes you unique is your combination of traits, and trying too hard to be unique, like trying to fit in, makes you lose your authenticity. Be comfortable in your own skin.
Here is my personal “Comfortable in my own skin” starter pack. Yours won’t look like mine.