In high school I was too embarrassed to go to my family doctor for birth control. I knew that I would be soon consummating my relationship with my high school boyfriend, and I knew that in addition to condoms, in order to protect myself from pregnancy, I needed to go on the Pill. I knew this because of Planned Parenthood’s informed, objective materials. Our middle school sex ed classes were nothing but hour-long smirk sessions, so the Internet was my sex education class. If it hadn’t been for Planned Parenthood’s website, I may never have found a comprehensive resource that gave me honest information about all forms of birth control–abstinence included!
When I finally told her, my mother was unwaveringly supportive. Many teens don’t have this luxury. I was 17 years old and I was mature and responsible about it. I knew that if I was going to have sex I needed to go on the Pill. Where did I procure this Pill? From my local Planned Parenthood Center. Yes, even middle class white girls who have their parents’ support use Planned Parenthood. Why? Because it’s a health clinic, one with informed medical personnel who withhold judgment, one with prorated prescription plans, one that I knew I could trust even more than my family doctor.
This is everything. It is everything I have been thinking about and crying about and trying to write about these past few weeks. Last night in bed with someone I’ve been seeing I started to sob and I couldn’t quite understand why–why I was crying and why I felt so embarrassed letting him see me that way, messy mascara and reddened cheeks and the ugliness of vulnerability. To let someone see your weakness automatically grants them the agency to hurt you. It has been three months but I am not ready to be hurt again. Not right now. Not yet.
After reading this interview I know what I was trying to say to him last night, in between the apologies for “being crazy” and the jokes meant to derail my own derailment. It had nothing and everything to do with him–nothing because he could be anyone, everything because he is the perfect metaphor for my own internal contradictions: for the first time in a long time, I have no idea what I want.
Today as I was cleaning out my childhood bedroom and packing for my upcoming move to San Francisco, I came across a “manuscript” of my writing that I compiled five years ago at age 17. It was just a packet of printed out paper, in Times New Roman, with a cover page that had a black and white picture of me drinking a beer on it. It was called “Resolutions and Revelations.” Most of the stuff in it was really just awful–I mean, some of the poetry actually rhymed. But one of the pieces I’d written was a chronology of essays about the boys I’d dated until age sixteen, and it was fascinating to revisit how I felt and thought about boys and sex at that age. It reminded me of a quote from An Education, which I watched for the first time last night and loved mostly because I completely related to it. “One of the boys I dated, and they were boys,” says Jenny after getting her heartbroken by an older man, “suggested that we go to Paris, and I said I’d always wanted to see Paris. As if I’d never been!” The twist is that she had already lost her virginity in Paris, she’d lost her youthful naivety in Paris, but in order to keep herself from hardening, she steels against that memory. Jenny retains some of that purity of youth by giving herself a “do-over” of sorts–this time she will have those experiences with boys, not men. Not all of us have that strength of will, but I admired that in her.