the quest for the cool girl

by Stella Ho ‘22

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment my aspiration to become the “cool girl” began. It was probably very young, almost definitely after watching a movie where there was a girl that all men wanted and all women wanted to be. The cool girl’s hair is artfully tousled, her style is effortlessly chic, her conversation is charmingly witty. She’s simultaneously one of the guys and part of a tight-knit clique of girls. As a result of all these traits, the cool girl has an unshakeable confidence that gains her access to the highest social circles and gets her the guy she wants. She fits in, but stands out. She’s perfectly imperfect. 

My exact model of the cool girl onscreen has changed through time, from Audrey Hepburn’s rebellious princess gleefully grabbing the reins of a moped in Roman Holiday to Love Quinn and her Mejuri-esque jewelry whipping up pastries at an organic market in You. But there is one constant: people are drawn to her. Desperate for friends and love in elementary school, I pinpointed her as my role model, and so she remained for over a decade. But in my long quest to look and act like her, I lost sight of reality.

Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

The thing is, the cool girl I admire is a character. More often than not, she’s a character defined by men, whether they’re the writers that created her or the male characters that love her. A prime example is the manic pixie dream girl who exists “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life,” according to Nathan Rabin, the critic who coined the term. This worshipful gaze turns her into the idealized version of woman that I saw onscreen and took as a representation of reality. Struck by her glamour, I applied that same male gaze to judge myself and all the girls I met. Each one was placed upon sight in a hierarchy of coolness, with me at the bottom fearing and craving acceptance from those I assigned to the top. Being cool meant they, and the guys who I pined after, would like me, not whisper about me. After all, that was how it worked in the movies.

So I set about trying to acquire the markers of a cool girl lifestyle. When I got my first pair of jeans in fifth grade, it was with the hope that if the cool girls from third grade saw me now—they had all worn jeans—they would like me. I yearned for Abercrombie & Fitch logo t-shirts in middle school because all the cool girls who easily held conversations with people wore pink and green ones with navy blue text. But at least this obsession with clothes wasn’t for naught, because paying so much attention to them grew into an honest love for fashion. That, an affection for stuffed animals, an interest in soccer, and a determination to learn economics are the few parts of my personality that I can say I chose for myself.

The attribute I spent the longest time trying to perfect, though, was the walk. When the cool girl strides through a crowd, her sophisticated bearing radiates easy confidence. To master this skill, I would cue up a video of Karlie Kloss’s runway walk and then practice how to walk in my room and basement—shoulders back, one foot in front of the other in a straight line, eyes blazing ahead. Just looking in the mirror, I knew my face wasn’t as pretty as a cool girl’s, but if I could walk as confidently as she did, then perhaps her confidence could become my own.

True, how you carry yourself can send a message about how confident you are. But what I failed to realize for so many years was that confidence doesn’t work from the outside in. Being able to casually drape your arm over the back of a chair doesn’t give you the cool girl’s spark. Real confidence from the inside out––knowing and celebrating your passions, motivations, and who you are––does. Playing a role every time I breezed down a hallway only made it harder for me to find this self-acceptance, though, because I was so determined to feel like someone else all the time. Every move was chosen to channel the cool girl’s outward nonchalance, but underneath the carefully curated exterior was a shaky persona with fiction ingrained in every move I made.

My role models only existed through screenwriters and costume designers, no matter how real they seemed on screen, so I was chasing after a shell. I had cultivated an image at the expense of developing a personality.

Victoria Pedretti in You. Photo courtesy of Netflix.

Since I worked tirelessly towards an impossible physical standard, I ignored setting an emotional standard for myself. As a result, I hurt myself and hurt others. I looked towards the movies for instructions on how I should feel about other people’s actions, so everything that wasn’t shown in them I accepted as being the way the world worked. More than once I sat with a group of guys making elitist, sexist, and racist jokes, and laughed along so as to have the privilege of being thought of as cool and carefree and real and not sensitive. From the male perspective that created the cool girl, there was nothing wrong with these jokes, so I found nothing wrong with them. It was simply the way people thought of each other. But deep inside, to quote Julie DiCario, “I heard women’s bodies evaluated and criticized in such excruciating minutiae, it affects the way I look at my body to this day.”

Knowing that people laughed at and criticized others so freely, and having done it myself, every time I interacted with someone I assumed they would sneer about it afterwards. Guys were the only ones I trusted for honest opinions, because I had heard them be critical. Equating cruelty with honesty led me to never be fully comfortable with a large number of the supportive, caring girls I called my friends. It was only a recent discovery that there is not an ulterior motive to most people’s kindness.

My kindness through the years gained me the trust of many people. I acted like an open book, but fear of ostracization meant only one or two people were entrusted with my deepest secrets. Under the impression that distrust was natural in any relationship––because, well, it’s integral to scripts––I only realized this year that betrayal is less than anybody deserves from a friend.

I had put so much stock into movies that they framed the world for me. In these stories, every glance, eyebrow raise, and change of tone has a meaning. Accordingly, my brain transformed every moment in my life into a frame, analyzed and filed away for reference. In conversations, after I had exhausted all relevant questions I could ask about who I was with, my mind blanked because I had nothing genuine to say about myself. I was so used to looking towards the cool girl, not human empathy, for guidance, that I short-circuited when I had to think for myself without instruction.

Sometimes, the movie playbook worked. The summer after tenth grade, I became friendly with a group of guys in my driving school. When it became clear that one of them––the one who said that women should stop being so sensitive about funny jokes––was into me, my brain whirled for a solution to get him off my back. Inspired by his enthusiasm for remarking I was on my phone too much, I asked my best friend to pretend to be my boyfriend over text the next day. He, bless him, agreed to my harebrained scheme that was straight out of a rom-com. The night before its execution, I put a red heart next to his contact name and told him what time to expect a text. I was particularly absorbed in my phone the next afternoon, and like clockwork, driving school guy commented upon it. “Sorry that I’m texting my boyfriend,” I said, sliding my phone onto the table. It worked like a charm; he didn’t say a word to me from then on.

Sometimes, though, the boy who looked at you with a smile in his blue eyes and who you felt like you had known for two years instead of two months whenever you laughed with him––sometimes, you have to accept that what he wanted from you was never emotional. You have to realize that this isn’t a movie where you’re both just bad at communicating feelings. What a story it would have been if it was and you both got past it, but there were no screenwriters giving added import to his actions.

Somewhere along the line, reality had become inseparable from the movies. Having a role model overtook my life to an unhealthy degree, until I could no longer separate real life and its complications from the linear stories that I absorbed and expected the world to emulate. People have depth below what they present on the surface, which I never quite realized because I had grown adept at compartmentalizing myself. Every time a situation called for a certain personality––studious overachiever, sympathetic friend, impulsive risk-seeker––I fully inhabited it, believing every word I said and feeling to my bones how I believed I should feel. In the moment, I was entirely myself, because I fooled myself into believing I was that character. Once I changed roles, all the thoughts and beliefs of the previous one were erased until I had to play her again. It was a deception that I hoped would bring me happiness, but all I felt as I sank into my pillow at the beginning of this self-quarantine was sorrow at not knowing who the girl behind all those faces was. Without an audience around to dictate my actions, I felt empty.

Before latching onto the cool girl ideal, I had been cripplingly shy, fragile, and sensitive to criticism. Following my heart down that path had brought me loneliness instead of happiness, so I failed to see the point in being myself. I wanted to act like the girl on screen because I hoped that if I did, and if I went through the same things as her, then the happiness she possessed could also be mine. But idealizing her impossible standard ended up being the source of my unhappiness because I became my own worst critic.

I don’t know who else needs to hear this, but as a reminder should I fall back into this cycle: being inspired by the movies is fine, just not to the point of delusion. Even learning from them to be more loving, accepting, and curious is fine. It’s when you begin treating yourself, and thus the people in your life, as characters within an idealized cinematic world that you miss the real one around you. The real world which will teach you so much more about how to live than the pretty people saying pretty words in scenes that are meant to be an escape from reality.

There are many definitions of the word “cool,” as evidenced by the many, many women labeled as such by publications. My mistake was thinking of all cool girls as a homogenous group. In fact, a lot of my mistakes stemmed from assuming that people were archetypes. My epiphany about real confidence and the diversity of coolness really, truly, did come at Wellesley, because it was the first time I had seen so many people with different interests, body shapes, and beliefs walk about with confidence. If such a wide range of people could be comfortable in their own skin and still treat everybody with kindness, maybe there wasn’t just one type of person everyone aspired to be.

This quest for the cool girl began because I cared too much about what others thought of me, but I unwittingly reinforced that habit by regarding life through a lens. When your entire life is structured around what you think others will think of you, then you never stop to examine what you yourself like, feel, want to say, or believe. The likeability you strive for will have no basis in reality, so you eventually find that you have to struggle to find reasons to like yourself. And as too many millennial pink motivational lockscreens on Pinterest have told me, you have to love yourself first before others can love you. Only now, shedding all these layers, do I understand why. To love yourself––and I don’t mean find yourself pretty, which was how I always used to take it––you have to know who you are and find that person admirable. The way I’ve treated myself and others for the past ten years is far from that.

So now I’m embarking upon a new quest, to find out who I am with no one else influencing me. To appreciate reality for what it is, instead of looking for it to bend towards a narrative arc. In self-isolation, I’ll look for my own definition of the cool girl, with myself as the starting point, so I can become a person I can say, without hesitation, is myself. I gave the illusion of the cool girl my heart, but I hope that in rebuilding what I’ve lost over the past ten years I’ll be able to recover it. I can say with confidence that right now I’m sitting at home with pastel blue nail polish typing this up, but as of this sentence, how the rest of this quest will go is yet to be resolved. After all, that’s how life works. I’m glad to finally be living it.

Stella Ho ’22 (sho2) has spent an ungodly number of hours in the past week watching The Office and identifying with Michael Scott much more frequently than she would like to. From the Pandemic 2020 issue.

Featured photo courtesy of Sézane.