My
name is Catherine English Leonard. It’s a big name. I go by Katie. I am in the
waning months of being 24. I live in New York but I’m from North Carolina. My
family moved from Northern Virginia to Asheville when I was almost 7, partially
because of 9/11 and the D.C. sniper. It was more and less complicated than that. My dad died very suddenly when I was 16. I
graduated from UNC Chapel Hill six weeks into the pandemic. It sucked. I broke
up with my boyfriend in November of 2020, partially because he slept with someone
else. It was both more and less complicated than that. It sucked. I moved to
New York in January of 2021. I lived in a fifth-floor walkup on the Lower East Side.
It was on Orchard Street, above a wedding dress store. When I moved out, it was
the final day of June 2022. It was a scorcher. The wedding dress store had already
moved, which helped. It felt like it was time for me to leave. My current
apartment has an elevator, and my room has an honest to God window. My commute
to work takes 15 minutes and I am a two-minute walk from Central Park. I decorated
my room with framed posters and books and gifts that people who love and have
loved me gave me. It’s peaceful. I like it here.
You
might be asking: why tell me this?
And
that’s fair!
When
I think about what I want to do and who I want to be, I constantly come up against
this question of why. It’s been a tough couple of years for everyone I
know, myself included. Putting the pandemic aside, I’ve been doing a lot of
soul searching in terms of like my dreams and aspirations and processing
through renewed feelings of grief and loss. I’ve been learning that a byproduct
of having your long-term boyfriend sleep with someone else and then almost
immediately moving to a city famed for being difficult is that your self-confidence
takes a hit.
Perhaps this feels like a no brainer; I realized this after approximately
three therapy sessions. I think the combination of having the world fall apart, no longer being in school, and living in
a new, hard place has left me even more afraid of failure than I used to be. I’ve
been asking myself why I feel so much shame all the time; shame over wanting
something, shame about the theoretical circumstances of my failure. I’ve wanted
to be a writer since I was a kid. I wouldn’t readily admit that until college.
It felt embarrassing, somehow. It begged the question: why? I felt like if I said
I wanted to be a writer, I therefore had to have some specific wisdom to share or
knowledge to impart. And I don’t feel equipped to do that.
The older I get, the more aware I am of everything I don’t know. I’m saying
that at 24—I can only imagine how much I won’t know at 70. But that’s putting a
lot of pressure on myself. I’m working on just being. I think, perhaps,
that writing for me isn’t about offering something brand new. It’s the only way
I’ve ever been able to say what I think and feel and let that exist. It’s letting
myself take up space, let myself breathe, let myself be.
Why
is it called relatablegirl.org? Why a blog?
Ultimately,
it’s called relatablegirl.org because relatablegirl.com was taken.
But
I picked relatable girl as the name because the term “relatable” is something
that has continually popped up for me over the last six years or so. When I was
18 and possibly even more earnest than I am now, I asked the person I was
infatuated with why he liked me. One of the reasons listed was that I was
relatable. I was insulted, frankly. I didn’t feel very relatable. I had a dead
dad! Everyone was always telling me how weird and strange I was! But it kept
popping up. Men, specifically, would tell me I’m really relatable.
It was presented
as a positive thing. I hated it. In the intervening years, I’ve restructured my
approach to it. The human condition is to relate. I think women can get shoehorned
into being some Buzzfeed version of relatable where they need tampons and are
constantly cyberstalking their exes, and I think that’s what I was reacting so
strongly to. But that’s not inherently the meaning of “relatable.” Relatable to
me, to this site that I am god-king of, is being willing to and open to expressing
and receiving emotion. It’s community, it’s listening, it’s speaking. Being a
relatable woman is seeing the humanity of the people around you and asserting your
own personhood in a compassionate and thoughtful way. It is letting yourself be
open to the experience of caring and the depth and breadth of emotion that comes
with living. I would like to think that is what is being said of me when I am
called relatable; that I am open, that I am caring, that I am able to listen.
The
blog part is because I wanted to have a space that I can put my thoughts and essays
where I can look at them, where there is no sense of failure because, fundamentally,
I cannot be rejected or fail if I am the one pulling the strings. In a grander
sense, I want a space for the girlies. I want a space for women—especially young
women—to write about whatever it is their life looks like. Being young is a lot
of scrapes and bruises and glorious hungover mornings with loved ones. In creating
this, I’ve also been thinking a lot about privacy vs. performance. It’s not
that this is going to be an exact journal or me talking about every last part
of my life (because that is inherently impossible and also arguably immoral),
but more so slightly curated reflections on what it is to be a young woman in
what feels like a dying society. It’s an essay, it’s a shopping list, it’s a
playlist. It’s authentic but not everything. It’s just me typing out silly
little things on a machine in a room I pay rent for. It’s me learning to take
up space. But, above all else, it’s just for me and you and whoever wants to
look at it. Isn’t that all anything is at the end of the day?
