My Journey Through Koren Zailckas' novel "Smashed" (Pt.2 - Chapter 1 Initiation)

So incase you haven't read Pt.1, this is basically just me going through a lifelong journey with the author of the book "Smashed". It's a lot of pondering and meandering over my life, and why I've done the things I've done. Going back and seeing what's happened to me, and how it's impacted me as a person ~ Not necessarily for the faint of heart. And as the Golden Rule states, if you don't have any nice to say, please don't say anything at all. Thank you! :)

Koren talks about a friend of hers named Natalie in middle school. She reminds me a lot of the girl friends I chose in elementary and middle school: chaotic, impulsive girls who seemingly would "peer pressure" me into doing things I would never dream of doing if I was otherwise alone.

One of them was named Chelsea. About two or three years older than me, she was always "cool" (she wore padded bras and thongs before I was ever able to) and everything she did was risky (like lying to her grandparents about where she was going and insisting I should lie too, or losing her virginity in the bushes behind the mall when she was fourteen). My mother called her "fast", and near the end of our friendship I was forbidden to even go over her house. This was when I was in middle school. I idolized her, but she was kind of mean to me sometimes when I broke her rules. Also like the author's friend Natalie.

My other friend was Claudia. She was the same grade as me, and we met when I was eleven. She stole things. She took her family's prescription pills. She insisted I ditch after school care with her to walk around suburbia, talking about life. Or ask for the spare key from my apartment manager so we could hangout in my townhome until my mom got off work. She would pressure me to dye my hair. Or to sneak makeup. Or to talk to boys. I'd tell her i liked someone, and she'd scream, "Kayla thinks your hot!!" as we walked by their two-story Stepford home and I ran ahead, embarrassed. We would sneak around an old abandoned house that I would otherwise never dream of even walking past. She was nicer, but there was still that type of pressuring to do things I didn't really want to do. It ended with her eventually pressuring me into dating her before the beginning of seventh grade. We drifted apart by my mother's choosing by the time eighth grade hit, and I moved away.

They were also both depressed, just like the author's friend Natalie. I once allowed Chelsea to borrow my Barbie dolls, and when she gave them back, they were covered in what looked like scissor marks. Claudia ended up attempting suicide multiple times in middle school. She was also raped by a sixteen year old boy when she was ten. Both had drug addicted parents, and had to live with their grandma. I felt bad for them in the same way the author felt bad for Natalie, and presumably her friends to come in the future. I felt bad that life had fucked them over so hard, and I felt responsible to be one of the very few friends they could have. I wasn't drinking when I was friends with either of them though, and never got the chance to drink with them.

Later in the chapter, she mentions that once other people find out that she's drinking alcohol, they suddenly want to be her friend. It makes her feel "cool" and at ease. I remember feeling this way in middle school as well. Flaunting that I had alcohol, so that other people or girls would think I was cool and want to drink with me. Than I didn't have to do it alone, and I easily made friends. It became an easy way to create bonds.

She also mentions how confusing it is to be a preteen girl. She has a great paragraph: "..And while I don't think I'd be any good at being a boy, given the fact that I am constantly afraid, constantly crying, and characteristically weak, I envy the fact that boyhood's rules are consistent. Being male is not a mess of contradictions, the way being female is. It is not trying to resolve how to be both desirable and smart, soft and sturdy, emotional and capable."

Another great exert: "..We are [girls]...alternately sipping So-Co and applying berry lip gloss. We are passing the bottle at the same time and for the same reason that we pass compact mirrors. We are trying to master what our mothers have taught us about looking "put together"'.

She talks about the confusion of teenage hood. Feeling like her closet is the mismatched of womanhood meeting girlhood, male meeting female, and feeling interjected from life. I remember that being a very common feeling for me in middle school. Baggy boy's jeans paired with tight shirts. Thigh high stockings with children's tops. Wanting to cut my hair short like a boy's but also wear makeup. Feeling very confused. Not really fitting in with society or family's expectations for what or who I should be. Wanting to buy men's tennis shoes and my mother being concerned, and saying no. Feeling like something was inherently wrong with me. Wanting to feel that wrongness and emptiness with anything that felt good, whether that mean drugs, alcohol, sex, or destructive behaviors.

She explains alcohol was her mental triumph into official initiated womanhood. I felt that sex was that for me. I thought that once I lost my virginity, I would be a woman. I would feel and act different. I kind of did. It's interesting that the author was conditioned to see it as a fall, rather than a triumph. Even though I was aware that supposedly "good girls waited", I also felt as though I had waited long enough. I also felt as though I had already experimented and was therefore not all that much of a virgin to begin with (because of the molestations and sexual assaults). I thought sex was one of the most womanly things I could do. To be held in someone's arms, and ravished, like in the movies. I had very unrealistic expectations of being a woman growing up. I blame a lot of it on the media.

At 13 is when I had what felt like my "initiation", except it wasn't the alcohol, it was sex. The sex felt consensual but not really, because it was with a man almost twice my age that I met online. Afterwards I cried. I had lied about my age, saying I was 17, and when he found out I was 13 he dropped me off at a friends house, drunk and on drugs. I wandered the streets for hours, afraid to go home. I felt okay though. I was glad to have gotten my virginity over with. Supposedly my friends had been having sex for months, and I felt "late". Like the author remembers the date of her first drink, I remember the day I "lost my virginity"/was raped was June 26, 2009.

I remember the next day feeling different. Everything changed. My whole perspective of self. I actually ended up feeling dirty too, which I wasn't expecting. I don't know if that ended up having to do with the fact that my whole family ended up finding out, but I just didn't feel well. I remember a few months later, crying with my mom on the couch, telling her I wanted my virginity back.

That's so fucking sad.