How to Grow Up (in Eight Simple Steps)

Congratulations to Olivia Campbell (VIC), winner of the Non-fiction category of the Hachette Australia Prize for Young Writers in 2024! Read Olivia’s winning piece below.

How to Grow Up (in Eight Simple Steps)

1. When you wake up with blood between your thighs

Wash your underwear in the same sink that you stood over last night, scudded with layers of toothpaste and limescale. Do not cry as the fabric soaks through with water and becomes saturated and heavy – heavy enough to pull you under.

2. When your friends congratulate you on becoming a woman

What else; pretend to be a woman. Stop reading comic books. Don’t roll down hills or play in the mud or run through the sprinklers in summertime. When you go to the park, don’t pretend to be a knight on the merry-go-round. Your tinfoil sword presses, sharp, against your hip. Knights don’t have breasts anyway.

3. When you look in the mirror and see someone ugly; with a band of acne and circles under her eyes

Tell your parents that you think you should stay home today; you don’t feel so well. Pinch a piece of your skin until pus comes out all in a burst and spatters onto the glass. Repeat. The next morning, when you see yourself scabbed and bloody, tell your parents that you don’t think that you’re quite yet better.

Lie down on the tile and convince yourself that it’s okay; you are beautiful. Once your best friend told you that your eyes were the colour of the ocean.

Wonder why you should have to be beautiful at all. You know why. ‘It’s okay baby, cellulite is beautiful, freckles are beautiful, and so long as you’re beautiful you’re wanted and valued and loved.’

Laugh.

For a moment, fantasize about shaving your head. Imagine what it would be like to let your nails grow out into talons. Or for you to rub olive oil into your chin and forehead, letting pimples grow beneath your skin like pearls.

No, not pearls. Something ugly. New-shooting mushrooms. Little chunks of scallop meat.

You could beat beauty at its own game like that; people would stare in awe and envy.

Again, laugh.

Wash your face and go back to sleep.

4. When you’re too tired to think and turn on the television

Realise that you’re the same age as the girls in every TV show, every movie, and you’ve never been in love. You thought you had more time. It’s like when you realised you were the same age as Percy Jackson and you didn’t have magic powers. That was two years ago now.

5. When you need to get out

Catch a train – don’t look at where it’s going. When a man takes the seat across from you and starts yelling into his phone and calling his girlfriend a bitch and whore, keep on turning the pages of your book. It’s okay; he can’t see you. Your jacket is the same green as the upholstery.

Leave at the next stop, and lean against the chainlink for a little while. Wander. Walk into a secondhand bookshop where it’s warm and there’s an old linen couch against the back wall that smells of incense and dust.

Read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale, Know My Name, The Colour Purple, Medea. Look in the room that’s set aside for religion and esoterica, at all those beautiful books in leather binding. Decide to be like Chavah and Miriam and Rachav and Yael and Esther. Like Yehudit, as painted by Artemisia Gentileschi. Not just them. Be like Moses and David and Solomon and Elijah and Isaiah and Ezekiel. Be like all the mothers, artists, warriors, poets, prophets, kings.

Be like Hashem himself, who you do not believe exists, but who you still believe made you in his own breasted image. Is this blasphemy?

Cry, for all your gratitude and anger.

6. When someone asks you why you’re angry

Sigh and unclench your fists and say simply that you don’t know, because for all your reading, you only have half of the words you’d need to say it.

7. When your whole body aches, so awfully that you can’t breathe

Don’t do anything at all. Walk to school, like you always do. Walk home, take the dogs around then block, stay up with your textbooks until 1:00. Because you’re not weak.

Weakness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So it doesn’t count if, that night, you finally gasp and cry in bed alone.

8. When you’re ready

Draw a bath and sit, knees to your chest, as you wait for the water to run warm. Breathe in steam; let it enter your throat and your lungs and become breath. Lather yourself with lavender oil and aloe vera and your mother’s pomegranate shampoo and dad’s aftershave. Sink beneath the water. Feel your hair tendril outwards, halo your face. Rest your head against the porcelain. Open your eyes and open your mouth and scream – without ever drowning.