So sometimes I listen to angsty teen music so I can sit there and pity my life with it. Because if Linkin Park can’t make you feel remorse, it’ll take nothing short of a dead kitten to get you going. Sometimes I post those lyrics on my Facebook or Twitter page and think, hey, that’ll show 'em all— I’m deep and philosophical and dammit, someone relate to me! But in all honesty... I’m not a depressed person. Sometimes I come home and mix cookie dough in a too small bowl and end up with synthetic cookie mix powder all over the counter. Sometimes I watch movies like Moulin Rouge by myself so I can cry loud and ugly and snotty and feel no judgment passed upon me. Sometimes I draw people in couples, holding hands and laughing and smiling and sometimes... no, all the time... the girl is prettier than me. But that doesn’t make me a depressed person. That makes me a teenage girl with a thing for risking salmonella poisoning in a bowl of cookie dough, a fascination in seeing just how despairingly I can cry, and a thing for making up love lives of everyone else to make up for the one I am so pathetically missing.

Love lives. Those are tricky things. And I’d like to send a shout out to Taylor Swift for not making it any easier on us teenage girls. Yeah, Taylor. Fifteen and in love and he broke your heart and I’m so sorry for that, because that sucks. But let’s look at the 93.5%of the population of teenage girls that still wear scarves to hide the zit on their collarbone and don’t wear the glasses they need to see the board with because they make them look like wannabe hipsters. Let’s look at girls like me who think, “Hey, I look okay today,” and then we go to school and wonder when we got a radio thrown into the bathtub with us that makes our hair reach for the ceiling. Let’s look at the girls like me who don’t know love as teenagers. If my knight on a white steed wants to come prancing up, that’s great. But in reality, my knight would run into a dragon, be eaten, and his white steed would probably be the tooth pick used to get the armor out of the dragon’s teeth.

Girls like me wake up and walk straight into their open door. Sometimes we get a bloody nose when we brush our teeth because we hit our faces on the faucet. When it’s six AM, motor skills and depth perception are not going to happen. Girls like me drop a shampoo bottle on their foot in the shower, and as they go to put it back on the shelf, holy cheese and rice there’s an entire avalanche of Tresemme for curly hair. Girls like me choke on liquids we haven’t put to our lips yet. We fall so hard up the stairs that as we slide down and our chins hit every stair on the way, we get rug burn on our knees and stomachs and sometimes our foreheads (it happens and if it hasn’t happened to you, you wait. It happens to girls like us at some point).

Girls like us. I say that because we’re all the same in a way; we’ve felt humiliation. For me it comes from the time my summer crush kissed me and I told him I thought he was doing something wrong. It comes from the time I realized a boy I’d been infatuated with for two years had sex with my best friend— upon her request. It comes from every time we’ve face planted in the hallway or struggled with our locker combinations for fifteen minutes only to realize we’ve been standing at the wrong locker. We all have these issues, and maybe there’s 6.5% of a female teenage population that has a great boyfriend or someone to write songs for, but that doesn’t mean that none of those girls have felt humiliation. Maybe they don’t sneeze and fall down at the same time but we’ll pardon them for being graceful because we’re all trying to figure out this thing called Growing Up. Linkin Park and cookie dough and Moulin Rouge are coping mechanisms. And I think they’re normal for girls like us. Because we’re not depressed. We’re the 93.5%.