GUTS, Fitting In and being the Best Girl
Hell is a teenage girl.
The 2023 film Fitting In opens with this quote from the Diablo Cody-penned 2009 cult classic Jennifer’s Body. It’s also a fitting throughline for Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album GUTS, released the same weekend Fitting In screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Both Fitting In and GUTS come at a time when I’m reconsidering and recontextualizing my own teenage girl years and my relationship with my body. I turned 13 in 2007 and was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease four months later. To say the dawn of teenhood is marked by a changing body is almost trite, if not for the fact that for me it quite literally did.
If you were a teenage girl, then you’re familiar with the hell. Teenage girls are meant to be everything to everyone: high achievers, hot girls, aloof, one of the guys, sexually available but not overtly so, athletic, feminine, polite, go-getters, hairless, doesn’t care about her looks, thin but not anorexic, calculated, friendly, never angry, never bitchy.
If you think I’m exaggerating, look at the superlatives in my yearbook: Best Hair, Sweetest Girl, Best Dressed, Best Eyes. Who can most capably perform the kind of femininity we value? Who will be the Best Girl?
Fitting In starts with the main character, Lindy (Maddie Ziegler), as exactly this kind of teenage girl. She’s a runner who is close to making the varsity team. She wears lipstick with her sweatpants. She’s the new girl, but she’s already well-liked by her classmates. She’s the Best Girl. The kind of girl who would probably win the Athletic All-American Award at her school. Presciently, she has an Olivia Rodrigo poster on her bedroom wall.
Lindy’s world starts to crack when she is diagnosed with MRKH syndrome. She learns she was born without a uterus or much of a vaginal canal, and it’s why she never got her period. She’s told she can be normal, that her condition is manageable, but nobody sounds convinced and by the way, asks her male OBGYN, has she considered vaginoplasty?
I remember the day I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. The hallway of the internal medicine unit of the children’s hospital and the examination room we were put in. I knew what was happening before I even knew the diagnosis. I knew shitting blood wasn’t normal. I knew the sharp stomach pains in science class weren’t normal but I smiled through it anyway.
We got pamphlets, but none told me what I wanted to hear. Most of them were made for much older adults. One was for children, written in Comic Sans. Your parents took you to a special doctor because you were having tummy pain, it said. Some children will get a special surgery — my mum took the pamphlet away. We weren’t going to talk about that. You’re still normal.
I was left home alone that afternoon. I screamed into a pillow.
Later that night, as a gesture of sympathy, my mum took me to the Smitty’s Diner. I had cheesecake for dessert, the kind that comes from a freezer and is drizzled in grainy chocolate syrup. We talked about who did and didn’t need to know about my diagnosis. We have to tell your teachers. You don’t need to tell your friends.
I wasn’t the Best Girl and this diagnosis made it clear that I never would be.
I don’t get angry when I’m pissed, Olivia Rodrigo shouts on the opening track of GUTS. As a teen girl, you’re already aware that there’s a public you and a private you. Public me was a good student, winner of academic awards, would put her hand up when she knew the answer in class and would be assigned to sit with the problematic kids to set a good example.
Private me was full of rage, who borrowed her dad’s cassette of Jagged Little Pill and wanted to scream just like Alanis. Who wrote in her diary about which girls at school were massive bitches. Who now had Crohn’s disease, which made her angrier than anything else.
Private me could not bleed over into public me. I still collected my awards at the end-of-year ceremony in the school gymnasium. I was invited to join in at the parent teacher conference, because there was never anything bad to say.
I got sicker and, on the inside, I got angrier. I was admitted to the hospital within a month of starting high school. The medications got stronger. There were more of them.
I tried hard to play at being, if not the Best Girl, then one who could reasonably compete for a second runner-up title. I wore the clothes everyone else wore and tried to style my hair in a way that hid the fact that it was falling out.
It didn’t really matter. Even if I didn’t tell, everyone knew something was wrong. I disappeared for weeks at a time. My body was inconsistent. One month I was rail thin, with the cool girls asking me how I did it (the answer: a careful combination of internal bleeding and medically-sanctioned starvation).
The next my weight would be unevenly distributed from the steroid medications I was taking. One afternoon on Facebook, I saw a picture from that day at school and felt bad for the ugly girl in it. Until I looked closer and realized I was that girl. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who thought I was ugly. An informal poll online agreed.
A boy commented on another photo of me and a friend, dressed in neon for a theme dance. “Soooo hot… NOT!”
I’d had my first kiss at that dance. After that comment, I realized the boy I kissed probably didn’t find me attractive either. Public me didn’t notice or care. Private me fixated on it.
In Fitting In, Lindy’s diagnosis throws a wrench in her plan to have sex. Cruel comments from boys in a class about reproduction are a further reminder that she cannot be sexually available in the way that the other girls are. She can’t have her own children. What does that make her?
She withdraws. From track, from her friends, from being the Best Girl. In trying to hide one aspect of her private self (the diagnosis), the other part (the anger) comes out.
When I was 15, I was prescribed methotrexate. The lead nurse sat me down with my mum and told the two things I couldn’t do on it: get pregnant and drink alcohol. No sex. No drinking. And certainly no drunk sex.
As Rodrigo sings on GUTS: the party’s done, and I’m no fun, I know.
I was in art class. I hated art class — I had already fulfilled my fine arts credit and had asked to be put in economics, but the guidance counsellor reasoned that I should take “passable” classes because of my frequent absences. The boys in art class were nonchalantly mean in the way that tenth grade boys can be. Art class meant 50 minutes of being put down in ways I could only smile and laugh at because I still wanted to be the Best Girl, and the Best Girl always laughs at a boy’s joke.
I was thinking about what it meant to not have kids. I didn’t like kids, I wasn’t even sure I wanted them. But now I wasn’t even allowed to decide if I really did. I at least wanted to have the choice.
“Surrogate mothers are immoral,” said one of the boys in art class. “If you can’t have kids, then you don’t deserve kids.”
I couldn’t take it. Fuck being the Best Girl. Fuck hiding.
“I can’t have kids, you dick.”
I told secrets I shouldn’t tell… I made it weird, I made it worse.
***
I got sicker still and still I pushed myself to be the good student. I taught myself high school coursework from the hospital. Zoom classes were a full decade away and we barely knew how to use Skype. I got mostly 90s and never less than an 80. I pushed out the thought that I could be dead next week and none of this would matter at all. I was supposed to achieve.
My body stopped becoming my body. Groups of mostly men gathered around me as I lay flat while a doctor pointed out all the things about me that were abnormal. Medical students lined up to touch me in different places. My bowel movements were kept track of and written down on a piece of paper taped to my door. Technically, I was consenting to all of this. You can consent to something and not welcome it.
Eventually, that special surgery was going to have to happen.
I turned 17 without a large intestine and without a chance at being the normal, cool, aloof, confident, available, sexy, bikini body, beach babe, feminine but only that certain type of feminine that we find acceptable girl I always wanted to be.
***
Senior year started much the same way as that night at Smitty’s Diner four years before. You don’t have to tell anyone you don’t want to, though this time with the addition of and boys probably won’t be comfortable with it.
There was always a hasty add-on of and if they aren’t then they aren’t the kind of boy you want to be with, but that part never really sinks in, does it? All you hear is a collection of words that tells you how you are not desirable, so you might as well not even try.
Each time I step outside, it’s social suicide.
I finished high school, got into the university of my choice on early admission without acknowledging how messed up it was that not one month after I nearly died I was supposed to start thinking about my career.
I went to prom, but left the afterparty before everyone else after a fellow partygoer, drunk, walked in on me in the bathroom and saw my ileostomy bag. (Hi Andrew! You were cute, sorry if I scared you.) I turned 18 that night.
The final track on GUTS is “teenage dream” with a title that is a haunting callback to Katy Perry’s song of the same name that was a massive hit when I was a teenage girl.
When am I gonna stop being wise beyond my years and just start being wise? When am I gonna stop being a pretty young thing to guys? When am I gonna stop being great for my age and just start being good? When will it stop being cool to be quietly misunderstood?
I’m on the other side of teen girlhood at 29. I’ve been legally disabled for 12 years. My disability will be a teen next year. I’m less hung up on the need to be everything. I’m still hung up on my teen years, and what they meant if anything at all.
Watching Fitting In was a head-on confrontation of all of the pieces of teen girlhood I had buried. The feeling of being constantly on edge with the fear that you’re going to be found out and othered. The persistent anger at a world that doesn’t take you seriously and the quiet acceptance that expressing that anger in public is not an option.
If Fitting In and GUTS are any indication, hell is still a teenage girl. At least now we can say it.
Fitting In is directed by Molly McGlynn and will be released in theatres in North America in February 2024.
