A Girl Most Ordinary

I am exactly what the title suggests, A Girl Most Ordinary. I’m not special or particularly unique. I don’t push the envelope of society or challenge conventions. I nestle right in. Like the stereotypical Canadian, I am overly polite, and I don’t like confrontation. It makes me incredibly nervous to the point that my chest becomes splotchy. But I’m taking baby steps to get better at taking people’s comments in stride and with a generous heap of salt. 

Given how I generally respond to confrontation, I thought I would respond the same way to attacks on things I write online. So I originally started this blog with the idea of sharing my thoughts with impunity. In other words, anonymously. But. Here’s the thing. Anonymity is not credible. And, if I’m going to be a writer, I have to be willing to put my name along with my thoughts. And this year, I actually did it. I published an opinion piece in the UBC student newspaper about basic bitches and pumpkin spice lattes (you can read it here:Drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes doesn’t make me basic or bitchy). I got a lot of shit for it. People told me it’s not a real problem (they have a point, I never said it was the biggest problem in the world), that I’m a terrible human being for writing it, I suck at writing and am a ditsy idiot (one person actually wondered how I could be in fourth-year English at UBC and be so dumb – nice right). I handled these surprisingly well actually, much to my own surprise. On the flip side of the haters online, my piece was also very well received – it got something like 550 likes on Facebook, just saying – and that’s the piece people remember me for. I’ve had lots of people I haven’t seen in years say that they saw my article, and that’s the one they’re referring to. So maybe sharing my thoughts is about taking the good with the bad. Pluralistic ignorance tells me I’m not the only one with these thoughts.

Ideally, I want my posts to inspire debates. Let me clarify that by debates I don’t mean brazen personal insults. Disagree with me all you want and let’s start a dialogue. Realistically, it’ll be my mom who reads this and maybe a handful of friends, but whatever. You gotta start somewhere right? Right.

So, here I am, voicing the concerns of the timid. Maybe I’ll become less timid as I do this more, who knows. Guess we’ll have to see.

Sincerely,

Rachel