GIRLS | CONFESSIONS OF A SIDE-KICK

When I was in Standard Four, my psycho teacher made us play that game ‘Drop the Can’ every single day. It’s the game where you sit around in a circle and the person holding the can runs around picking up a boy-girl train. That game has scared me for life. I had that squeezed feeling in my stomach every time the train passed me by, and I got the message: “You haven’t been chosen.”

Something inside us girls longs to be picked out from the crowd. But I had the message that other girls got to be the heroine, the object of desire, and I got the role of ‘sidekick’. Awesome.

If I liked a guy that didn’t like me back, it seemed like more evidence that I wasn’t the chosen one. The only cure was taking to my bed, and crying into a tub of icecream, ‘What’s wrong with me!?’ The enemy whispered sweet nothings in my ear about not being attractive enough, about not being girlfriend material, and I asked those lies into my heart.

Counsellors tell us that we can only control ourselves, so we blame ourselves when something hurts us. We say, “What’s wrong with me? I need to be prettier, more outgoing, less outgoing” …and so on. It’s the only way we know how to control our world.

But we can’t control the world, we can’t even control boys. Not everyone that we fancy will fancy us. Just like we don’t fancy everyone we know. It doesn’t mean that we will always be the sidekick and never the one.

The only real cure to believing lies is to believe the truth. And the truth is that being rejected by a guy doesn’t feel good, but it does not define who you are.

Telling yourself the truth is really hard work. Sometimes what feels true is actually a lie, and what feels like a lie is the truth. I may feel rejected, unlovable and not good enough, but God tells me in His Word that I am chosen. God declares with his entire Creation that I am loved, valued and beautiful in His eyes. He has surrounded me with friends, who testify to the fact that I am accepted, just as I am.

God tells us to take every thought captive, and that takes endurance and discipline. The other day I was talking about boys with my friend and she started to say something like, “What’s wrong with me?” But she didn’t even let herself finish the thought, she got angry and said, “No, no I’m not going to think about the things I don’t like about myself. I used to do that, and now I won’t even speak it out loud. As soon as I think it, I say ‘No!’”.

The cool thing is that she told me those negative thoughts hardly ever pop into her mind anymore. She is one girl who has learnt how to take her thoughts captive. It’s the kind of fighting talk that belongs to the heroine, not the sidekick. And I want to be more like that, because I know that I am God’s chosen one.

Side Note | Little-known fact about boys: Playing ‘Drop the Can’

A typical ten-year-old guy feels stink choosing the girl he secretly likes, cause then everyone will know he likes her. However, this would often cause the girl to think he didn’t like her, when in actual fact, he did… he just wasn’t able to show it. Moral of the story: things aren’t always as they appear!

Ingrid Goodwin