A torn notepad page on which is written the following message: My feed is filled with posts on the hunt for the x girl. X is a blank for any word, but especially ones that bring to mind images of the elite or the unobtainable. Even tomatoes have been compromised; suddenly farmstand staples are brand emblems of vaguely European upper-class summertime. A TikTok slideshow explains to me that a sunset girl has vivid dreams, but a deer girl wears pink to pilates. Categorization can be fun. There isn’t much difference between the x girl and a magazine quiz about matching personality to donut hole flavor or pizza topping. The danger is how easily we get absorbed in defining girls - so the prison walls edge closer and closer. There are two myths about the time we currently live in that make our cage all but invisible. One: that American women are free. Two: that the Internet is unbiased. I think the majority of girls know both are fake in some capacity, but it’s difficult to fully recognize just how much we’ve been lied to. Not only are lies everywhere, they’re also getting harder to spot. Girls lie to each other without realizing it. Time seems to move so much faster now, attention is harder to retain. The wheel keeps spinning, and The Man no longer has to lift a finger to do it. We can just eat ourselves alive, over and over. A part of me feels like all I’ve ever wanted is to be the x girl. She is neat, not only in the sense that she regularly cleans her room but that she fits seamlessly into the 1500 x 1000 pixel box I can never seem to breathe in. If my profile is all anyone sees of me, then it’s much easier for everybody if I make myself as palatable as. It’s significantly easier for me, seeing as I’m the one who has to look in the mirror and accept the face and body staring back. If she’s a deer girl, then she’s not just a girl. She’s not just me. Which is ideal, since I don’t really like living as me. Underneath the labels are a generation of girls who feel utterly defenseless, scrambling for rights previously assured. It’s easier to be the x girl, or to at least desperately try to be her, because she isn’t human. Being human is hard. Being a girl is hard. Sometimes it fucking sucks. But I’d rather be a girl and myself than just an x girl. I don’t mean we can’t have fun buying useless things and pinning pictures of tomato pie on Pinterest. What I want is to learn how to acknowledge what makes me a girl all on my own, separate from social media and separate from anybody or anything else. I want to collage my own definition of what a girl is. TODAY GIRL is because today I am a girl - whatever that means - and nothing can take that away. Just because I can’t afford the pearls or the expensive fitness courses doesn’t make me any less so. Just because somebody might say I’m not, or some politician might try to make the word meaningless. I’m a girl because I say so. And so are you, if you want to be. Maybe we can figure out what it means to be a girl together. A fluffy-tipped pen ready to write. The name Annabelle Lynne signed in purple ink.