"Girl, it's so confusing sometimes to be a girl"
on relating to lorde's verse in Charli xcx's "Girl, so confusing featuring lorde"
hi.
today i want to talk about lorde’s verse in the remix that broke the internet of that one Charli xcx song that literally everyone knows, “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde.” here are the lyrics for reference, if you somehow managed to avoid this song last summer:
Well, honestly, I was speechless / When I woke up to your voice note
You told me how you'd been feelin' / Let's work it out on the remix
You'd always say: Let's go out / But then I'd cancel last minute
I was so lost in my head / And scared to be in the pictures
'Cause for the last couple years / I've been at war in my body
I tried to starve myself thinner / And then I gained all the weight back
I was trapped in the hatred / And your life seemed so awesome
I never thought for a second / My voice was in your head
Girl, you walk like a bitch / When I was ten, someone said that
And it's just self-defense / Until you're buildin' a weapon
She believed my projection / And now I totally get it
Forgot that inside that icon / There's still a young girl from Essex
oof. i don’t know about you, but for me those lyrics are painful. as someone who has been described several times over as having a “resting bitch face” (RBF) and even identified that way myself at different points in my life, the lines “Girl, you walk like a bitch / When I was ten, someone said that” hit me right where it hurts. when you’re told in elementary school that you look angry when you’re simply minding your own business and this makes people think that you don’t like them or are a mean person, your self-image is changed. you begin to see yourself as this unapproachable, mean person who people don’t like.
what happens to your developing social life and sense of self when you enter every social encounter with the internal assumption that people will think you’re mean or scary? for me, the fear of being perceived poorly and thus disliked was so strong that i retreated into a hard, protective outer shell. it seemed easier to not approach people at all than risk their judgment.
my social anxiety led me to embody exactly the kind of person that people had been telling me i looked like: scary, hard, unapproachable, and uninterested in talking to people, even while i internally yearned for connection and belonging. i often tell people nowadays that i’m more scared of them than they are of me, kind of like a creature in the wild (lol). this developing of a hard protective layer has been called the “defensive crouch,” originally a sports term (i think) but now used to describe a person who enters a social situation with the belief that they will be perceived poorly or incorrectly, that the world is “against them,” so to speak, and so preemptively protects themselves from this imagined threat. when you are focused on protecting yourself from perceived threats, you are unable to be vulnerable about yourself or curious about others. connection and belonging are cut off at the knee.
lorde perfectly encapsulates the feeling of the defensive crouch in the next lines of her verse, “And it's just self-defense / Until you're buildin' a weapon.” in trying to protect yourself, you inadvertently harm both yourself and your relationship with others, which is what you were trying to protect in the first place. you want to be safe from the negative judgments that you believe others have about you, so you cut them off to shield yourself from perception. this cutting off, this shielding, prevents others from truly seeing you, and in many instances, especially for me, actively pushes them away.
“She believed my projection / And now I totally get it.” Looking back on my life and the difficulties i’ve had connecting with others and maintaining close relationships, i see how some of it was caused by this shell that i formed around myself. of course people didn’t want to approach me when all of my body language indicated that i wasn’t open to conversation; of course i wasn’t able to get close to people when i didn’t foreclose any vulnerable information about myself or display curiosity about others. in trying to control how others perceived me, i made their perceptions negative.
“I was so lost in my head / And scared to be in the pictures.” i have been so worried about others’ perception of me, not just my physical appearance but also my personality, for so much of my life that i fear i’ve missed out on experiences and relationships because of it. because i was so afraid of the world and so determined to control it, i didn’t allow myself to be fully seen in the world. and as Brené Brown says in her book Rising Strong, “Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.”
this can affect people of all genders, but women and femme-presenting people are particularly vulnerable because of the fact that a phrase like “resting bitch face” even exists. men are rarely described as having an RBF; women are often described this way. maybe if a phrase like “resting man face” (ew) also existed this could be different, but the term we use currently is inherently gendered. women are bitches; women have resting bitch face. men just… i don’t know, look serious? he’s obviously thinking hard about something? my neutral face is assumed to be negative, while men have the privilege of being perceived as just neutral.
i think a potential solution, or at least a strategy, to overcome a defensive crouch can be found in the last line of lorde’s verse: “Forgot that inside that icon / There's still a young girl from Essex.” Every single person you meet, no matter how cool, calm, or collected they appear to be, has an inner self that longs for connection and belonging, just like you. it is some of our basest human desires to connect with others, to see and be seen, and to belong to a community. in the united states’ hyperindividualistic culture, we sometimes forget that we are a communal species at our core, but it’s worth reminding yourself. look for the common ground between yourself and other people; be vulnerable in your self-disclosure even when it’s terrifying; have a genuine curiosity about others’ experiences. i’m still working on this, but i like to think that i’m a little more open than i used to be.