How I Became a Feminist

I was out the other day; basking in the California sun and soaking up the new life my tuition dollars were paying for. It was just over 70 degrees, yet the natives surrounding me complained about missing the “warm weather.” I pushed that aside, attending to other stereotypical California ideals instead.

“Do you guys surf?” I asked.

The tall, soft-spoken boy to my left, whom I had only just met, seemed appalled. “Yes. All the time,” he replied.

The other two boys, equally egotistical in their answer, said they surfed too.I turned to my right where Anna, a girl Malibu born and raised, looked similarly appalled.

“No. Never,” she said. Her friend Lana nodded in agreement.

“Why not?”

Ava told me the water was cold and it seemed really hard. Lana said she didn’t want to get calloused feet or salt water up her nose.

“But you have never wanted to just try?” I prompted again, growing with confusion. The ocean was miles and miles away from Colorado and I had found the drive to try before. The ocean was in their backyard, yet they both replied “no” in unison. 

…

Many times, I have been in situations where people won’t try. And I always looked at them with reasoning. People scared of heights won’t try roller coasters, people scared of the ocean won’t try scuba diving. It makes sense. But what didn’t make sense to me was where the fears came from. Who fostered them? And why, every single one, seemed to belong to a girl.

As I recounted all the instances where the strong women in my life stood on the sidelines, I felt a sense of dissonance. Sidelines have always been what scared me the most, and that is how I approach life—desperately trying to be part of the action.

It stumped me, thinking about it. So before I pried into why others were the way they were, I pried into why I was the way I was. It came to me during over break. 

Home from college for the very first time, my mom had taken the liberty to find all my old journals from childhood. Amongst forgotten crushes and dead fish, I found one other constant character. 

My brother.

I wouldn’t consider us the super close type of siblings. We’re not on each other’s Instagrams and we don’t recap about our weekends. In fact, when Aidan and his girlfriend of over two years broke up, I only found out from my parents.

My mom doesn’t like this because she is attached at the hip to her sisters. “Talk to your brother,” she will say at our family dinners.

So I’ll turn and ask, “What did you do today?” 

Aidan will barely disengage from his three-patty burger before replying “Nothing.” He is a paramedic, so nothing meant reviving someone with Narcan, going 130 down Monaco, and sticking needles into sickly arms.

“You?” He will ask back.

“Nothing,” I’ll say. Nothing for me usually means hours of writing, the patio with my guitar, and a good heated fitness class.

Mom will then bark at us about our lack of interaction. “He is all you got,” she’ll say to me. 

“Really? You’re not gonna pop me out a sister?” 

“Nah she’s too old.” 

Aidan and I fist bump across the table and go back to eating.

“You two,” Mom says, “I can’t stand you two.

Looking through the old journals and yearbooks she got down from the attic reminded me of how that’s always been the case. My 4th grade yearbook picture was me in Aidan’s old BMX t-shirt and bright blue sports shorts. I could feel Mom’s detestment through the bitchy smile I had plastered on. Making her mad has always been a little fun.

I followed the BMX shirt to the BMX club section; where my name was listed with Aidan’s and ten other guys. My bike was purple and had skulls lining the pegs. I can remember going with my mom and brother to the park and listening to her exacerbate worry into the dirt.

“Be so careful Addie,” she would say, as both Aidan and I rode off.

I’d follow him down the winding trails, over the three foot jumps. I’d follow him until I fell so many times my scraped knees looked like a Halloween costume.

I followed him pretty much everywhere. To…

• my first double black run at Vail, which at the time, he said was a blue 

• the shooting range where he laughed as the blowback from a gun 4 times my size made me jump

• the highest up in our front yard tree you could go

• 
  

I never saw a difference between us. Despite my parents consoling my tears with, “He’s older, he’s bigger,” after lost competitions, I never believed them. Aidan never really let me believe them.

Yes he was older, and bigger, but he treated me like I was the same. He would shoot me with the same nerf guns he shot his friends with, and expect me to keep his same speed when we biked to get ice cream.

“Wait!” I would scream from the top of our street, peddling my legs like a hamster in a wheel.

“No,” he would shout back, barely working up a sweat.

…

Aidan was always doing things most kids don’t do. When he took up climbing, instead of doing a lesson at a gym, he built a belay system in our front yard. And I was the test dummy that had to make sure it worked.

When he got an electric scooter, I was placed in a wagon, tethered behind him with climbing rope. And it was me that had the freckles skinned off my nose when he took a turn too fast.

His things turned into our things.

I grew up so engulfed in the concept of “trying” it rarely occurred to me not everyone does. That is what I knew, because Aidan never made fun of me for failing.

He’d yell “chicken” as I quivered at the sign of a tree glade, but once I started going down, his taunting stopped. Not when I slid on my butt or ran into a mogul, not when snow got sent spiraling up my coat. Instead he would say, “Let’s do it again.”

Our hobbies naturally started to separate, especially when he got to the age where bringing your little sister around wasn’t cool anymore. It was near the end of middle school for me anyway, and I needed to start investigating hobbies on my own. 

Looking back, I realize it was not all on my own.

The five failed instruments, the seven different sports, the three school plays, the two student council speeches, all of it stemmed from Aidan. I took massive, blind, and frequent swings at life because that is what my childhood was—swinging and falling and crying and laughing; then waking up to do it again tomorrow. 

Ironically, I think it was my brother who taught me how to be a feminist. By expecting no less from 12 year old me than from his teenage friends, I learned to see no more in men than I see in the mirror. 

So we’re back at family dinner.

“What did you do today?” I ask Aidan.

“Nothing,” he says, “You?”

“Nothing.”

The ambiguity isn’t because we aren’t close. I think it’s because we are close enough that are nothings have become the same. Nothing to Aidan and I is swinging and falling and crying and laughing. 

Now I might snowboard alongside him with pink gloves and dangly earrings instead of his hammy-downs, but I still keep up. He still expects me to.

We have grown apart in a lot of ways, but I like to think of it as more of a divulgence. I have grown apart, but from his roots.

…

I’m back in the California sun. It’s one of the days that makes me love it here; with SunnyD rays and baby blue skies. I jump down from the lifted truck and start to fight my wetsuit on.

“How long have you been surfing?” I ask the four dudes who took me.

Two of them say five years, one says three, and the other says seven. 

“You?” The blonde asks back.

“This is my third time I think.”

We walk to the ocean and I try to mimic how they carry their boards. My arm is just shy of being able to grasp around, so I flip it upside down and balance it on my head.

The guys stay on the shore, inspecting the swell and other words that I didn’t care to learn. I ran into the water instead, flailing from the cold like a seizing bird. It took everything in my noodle arms to paddle, but I kept going, exhilarated by the idea of actually catching a wave. 

A big one was coming, a real one, not white water like I had tried to surf in the past. I turned to face the shore, paddling with all I could. The wave scooped me up like an ice cream worker, if the worker then threw their scoop across the register. Water went protruding up my nose and my body seemed to split in nine directions.

I came up, gasping for air, meeting the tenured surfers’ eyes. “You okay,” one shouted to me from the beach.

“Oh yeah,” I replied, “It was only my first try.”