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I Beat Up a Boy for My Own Betterment

Everything came to a head. I fought back. Literally.

Vanessa Torre
7 min readJun 27, 2019
Photo by Timothy Eberly via Unsplash

No one had any idea what to do with me when I was nine years old. That included me.

I was awkward as hell and, more than anything, I just wanted to be less so.

I was goofy looking. I had a serious overbite and was pretty tall and gangly. I had no idea how to pull off this magnificent craptastic array of physical attributes.

Adding to the mess was that I had super weird, coarse, Italian girl hair. If I wanted it to go right, it went left. If I wanted to go up, it went down.

It was like every follicle was possessed by a rogue Gilda Radner character.

There was a girl at school named Stefanie. With an F. Of course. I would spend hours in front of the mirror trying to emulate her hair. It was perfect. She was perfect. The result was never what I wanted it to be. There may have been jokes that ensued about fingers in light sockets.

Elementary school playgrounds are a hotbed of self-esteem ruining events for kids.

The problem was never really the girls. In fifth grade, girls really don’t know how to be bitchy yet. They kind…

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Vanessa Torre
Vanessa Torre

Written by Vanessa Torre

Top 10 feminist writer. Writing, coaching, and relentlessly hyping women in midilfe. linktr.ee/Vanessaltorre Email: vanessa@vanessatorre.com

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