Once upon a time, I wanted to be an adventure girl, like George from “The Famous Five.” Like her, I too wanted to discover treasure in dark caves, stare down the guns of pirates with a snarling dog by my side.
In those days, I yearned for freckles and skin browned by the warm British sun, like George’s. In those days, I gloried in my flashes of temper, as George did. But in those days, as much as I tried, I could never really be George.
Because George was brave, the girl who never ever cried. I was not that girl. I was the crybaby.
When I fought with my brother and lost, my eyes smarted with a familiar heat. “Stop!”
When I thought children were pointing cruel fingers at me, my lips quivered. “Weakling, is this all you can do?”
When I stood alone in a corner, while my classmates ran races, my eyes became hot wells of pain.
When my teachers refused to let me dance or act because I was blind, the first tear came to rest at the tip of my eyelashes. “Don’t think about the pain, suck the tears back into your wounds.”
When a beloved teacher left, when I did poorly on my math exam, the first tear tipped over, then rolled down my cheek. My hands trembled, my body shook, that one tear became many that turned my eyes into overflowing rivers. “You did it again! Why are you not brave? Why are you not George? Why are you such a crybaby?”
Every week I prayed for the strength to be invulnerable, to be tearless. But every time, I cried, and I hated the tears that flowed out of me, the tears that kept me from being George.
Even though the adults around me did not know George, they too wanted me to be strong. “Tears are for the weak,” they cried, as they crowded too close. “I thought you were braver than this. Stop crying! Everyone’s looking.”
And then at the end of 12th grade, I moved to the U.S., a country 17 hours away from India. I expected homesickness to hit hard. I expected rivers to flow.
But I could not cry. It was as if the tears were somewhere deep inside me that I could not reach. This was it. I was finally George, the girl who never cried, not when I woke up from nightmares, not when I paced aimlessly in the silence of my empty room.
My unshed tears became a seething pool of anger, loneliness and fear that crashed against the walls of my chest, bubbled up the funnel of my throat. I became a vessel of stone, holding too much. If this is what meant to be George, perhaps this is not what I wanted.
Before I learnt to cry again, I had to learn to speak.
The Campus Ministry small group that I joined gently brought out the many words that choked my throat. The words became stories of loneliness, of struggling to find God, of moments of grace. As the words flowed out of me, they were received without judgment, cradled in the hands of my friends.
I think the words slowly ate away at the walls that held my tears prisoner. In my second semester, I began crying again. At first, I cried in the silence of the chapel where only Jesus heard me. But during my third semester, I cried on the walk from Corbett back to my dorm. This time I did not try to be George. I just cried. And the world flowed around me, peacefully. There were no questions, no words of contempt. In that moment, I experienced freedom.
Last semester, I almost cried through a whole week of hormones and period cramps. My roommate held my exhausted body in her arms, not asking me for a reason, not telling me to be brave. I lifted my head from her shoulder with a wobbly smile, and slowly came back to myself. That same semester, I cried in front of my friend at the dining hall as I told her how much I had been missing her. My tears washed me clean of all the anger that I had been holding.
In that moment, I was fully human.
As I look back on George, I realize that she is no longer my hero. Today she is a little girl that I want to cradle in the palm of my hand. I look down on her, and realize that she is a product of a patriarchal society that believed that a girl could be brave only by embracing elements of toxic masculinity such as aggression and anger. Georgina was a little girl who grew up believing that to go on adventures, she must hide her tears, her pain, even from those who loved her, clench her little fists and face the world with blazing eyes.
I am not George anymore, neither do I want to be. Unlike her, I have not discovered treasure in mysterious caves, nor have I faced pirates with my chin high. Unlike her, I am a girl who cries when I need to. But I am also a girl who flew from India to the U.S., who embraced independence, who learnt to walk alone on Notre Dame’s enormous campus. I might not be George, but I too am an adventurer.
Hannah Alice Simon was born and raised in Kerala, India, and moved to the U.S. for college with the dream of thriving in an intellectual environment that celebrates people with disabilities. On campus, you will mostly see her taking the longest routes to classrooms with her loyal cane, Riptide, by her side. She studies psychology and English with minors in musical theatre and theology. You can contact Hannah at hsimon2@nd.edu.
