Alyssa Lobatch, Period 1, 10/10/2023

Alyssa Lobatch Period 1 07 Oct 2023 Modern Mythology 2024

Socio-Political Consciousness

I ❤ NY!

When a personality quiz is deeply considering what kind of soup I am and profoundly asks what my dream city is, 99% of the time, I choose the Big Apple. (The other 1% is for when I feel staggeringly adventurous and opt for London.)

Something about New York makes it my favorite place in the world. I love the convenience of public transportation, the delis on every corner, the diversity (and great restaurant options that come with it). I love the easy access to Broadway shows. I love our native wildlife! I love the culture of trashing on Staten Island and speed walking everywhere. I love that we know our city isn’t as glamorous as small-town-dreamers think it is, but we are still proud. We are New Yorkers.

New York is familiar. I can’t imagine growing up anywhere else. I don’t feel fully comfortable anywhere else. And that’s why it’s so heart-wrenching to hear about a homicide on the A train, or a woman getting sexually assaulted on her way to work, or a 13-year-old being killed on the s78.

Yesterday was Staten Island Tech’s homecoming game. I sat with my friends and cheered for the marching band and waved a white pom pom in the air, not knowing that, as the Seagulls scored a touchdown, five bus stops away some mother lost her little boy. The perpetrator was also a 13-year-old boy. He got on the bus, started an argument with the victim, and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. As I rode the bus home, I stared, wide-eyed, out the window as we passed the news vans and yellow tape warning “POLICE LINE - DO NOT CROSS”. I couldn’t stop thinking about the passengers on that bus. How did they react? How do you even comprehend something like that? What would I have done? Would I have screamed? Or would I have opened my mouth only for no sound to come out, like in some of my nightmares? I started looking at every person on the crowded bus around me, checking their hands to make sure they weren’t holding knives, making myself small to avoid bothering anyone. Why was that guy looking at me? Is he doing the same thing I am? Did he just zone out? Is he a creep? Is he dangerous? Am I in danger? Do I need to get out of here?

I feel like I was selfish, to be honest, to think of myself instead of that boy, or his family, or his friends. But maybe after hearing about a situation like that, it’s okay to be selfish. Maybe it’s necessary to survive. The really horrible thing is that this is far from the first time I’ve checked people’s hands or made an escape plan or felt my stomach drop when I got a bad feeling about someone on the bus. I genuinely did not notice this until about 20 minutes ago, but I perform this subconscious routine every time I use public transportation or walk home alone at night. I don’t think that’s normal, but it’s my way of staying vigilant and keeping myself as safe as possible.

Sometimes I’m a little jealous of my brother, who I love to the moon and back, but who doesn’t really understand how I feel when I grab his arm on the subway and start chattering to ignore a sudden feeling of uneasiness. He doesn’t get what it is to check your reflection in car doors to make sure no one is following you, to judge whether you’d be fast enough to outrun the 70-year-old man who just told you he liked your skirt, to have a code word when you call your friends to signify if you’re in danger. And it’s not his fault, obviously. Basically all of my paranoia stems from me being a teenage girl (which he is not) and knowing about the things that can happen to them (which he does not have to worry about as much as I do).

I want to clarify that I am extremely happy that he doesn’t have to go through my unfortunate checklist. I would never, EVER want him to experience these feelings. At the same time, though, it stinks a little bit to know he can’t quite relate.

I’m also painfully aware that my fear reflects prejudice. When I get scared in a situation like this, it is almost always by an old white man. I feel like that sounds strange coming from me, a white girl, because I don’t have to suffer the racism that would come from this hypothetical dangerous old white man if I wasn’t white. I know people have it worse. I know women make up half the planet and I’m not special. I know girls who aren’t white have it worse than me. I know girls who wear hijabs or live in poverty or are transgender have it worse than me.

I acknowledge that I hold some privilege, and I want to make sure it’s clear that I’m not writing this just to complain or trauma-dump. I am writing this because every girl I know goes through something similar, and millions of teenage girls around the world live in the same kind of fear I do. Along with gossiping about crushes and wandering around NYC and cheering at our homecoming game, this is the teenage female experience.

There’s a TikTok sound that went viral a few months ago that I think about pretty often (I am giggling currently as I write this because I think it’s very silly of me to close my blog with a TikTok quote). The sound is often used with serene music and a montage of aesthetic photos. A girl in a voiceover says, “How I love being a woman.”

Yes. How I love being a woman.

And how I sometimes hate it, too.