i really needed this

now I get to give it to someone who does.

I’m at a school in Melbourne about an hour and a half into co-facilitating a workshop. Our fifty girls aged between seventeen and eighteen are sitting in a circle on the classroom floor. As one of the girls takes her chance to share, she is crying. She holds her scarf up around her face so that only her eyes are visible. It seems like the vulnerability almost feels like it’s come as a shock to her and her body language communicates to me that this isn’t at all comfortable for her. As she speaks, she teeters on the verge of the-world-is-ending crying; the deeply raw and honest kind that only girls do, but she manages to hold it together helped by the fact that her friend sits and strokes her leg. During a pregnant pause, one of the girls next to her gently asks us for the box of tissues that I’m holding. I’ve been passing them out throughout today’s workshop as it’s been a particularly emotional one.

”No, because we need them!” I joke, dabbing my eyes and nodding at my co-facilitator for the day who is also tearing up. I feel a little bit of the tension burst and the girl continues sharing, coming to a natural conclusion.

I push the box across the circle to her and she rips a couple out, passing them between her friends. In that pause I realise I have momentarily become lost in the last few stories we have heard, and have accidentally taken off my facilitator hat; I run through some questions in my head: What time is it? How long do we have? What does my co-facilitator need from me right now?

I re-centre and pull myself out of my feelings. As my colleague continues to move around the circle, I notice a bubble of petulance rise to the surface of my chest; a sort of non-discript anger. After a couple of seconds I hit on what it is: fuck, I needed this in school. School absolutely failed me.

For the last half an hour of this circle, I have witnessed teenage girls reach across the aisle to friend they have hurt, acknowledging how they have excluded them, asking for their forgiveness, telling them it shouldn’t have gone down this way. I never saw that in school. I’ve watched girls explore why we treat each other the way we do as women and where that comes from; something I didn’t do until I was in my twenties. I’ve seen them tell each other, through pink cheeks, how wonderful they think each other is; something my friends and I did only through notes or inventing stories and characters of ourselves. In previous workshops, we’ve written lists of all the things the world tells us we should be, we’ve talked about hating our bodies and, critically, we’ve blamed society instead of ourselves; something I never had the opportunity to do and still struggle to do now some days. The excruciatingly embarrassed fifteen year old who bought dangerous pills off the internet to try and “grow boobs” and had surgery at twelve because of how badly she was bullied by boys is still inside me, and she is watching all this asking “why did I miss all this? Did nobody care?”.

Part of this work is healing for me; I feel like learning to facilitate workshops that empower girls is a sort of re-writing of history for my younger self. But sometimes it also brings up anger because maybe it wouldn’t have taken me so long to realise I wasn’t the problem if I had a “me” coming into my school in year 10, 11 or 12. Maybe I wouldn’t have hated my body with such venom, or made other girls school experiences harder in small ways. Maybe I wouldn’t have dated boys who were mean or over-exercised in my early twenties so much.

Or maybe “what if” isn’t helpful at all. Maybe I had no choice and now is when I can make it meaningful. Maybe without that failure I never would have found myself here, in these rooms, watching young girls show up for each other in ways I would have dream of as a teenager.

G x