Nine years ago, I had my first serious “big girl panties” moment: that moment when, in a fight-or-flight situation, you choose to fight, where you understand the world doesn’t revolve around your snowflakey idiosyncrasies.
There comes a time when you realize sometimes shitty things happen to good people. You have a choice to disintegrate or, in the words of my mother, “put on your big girl panties and get on with it.”
Let me tell you, sometimes that’s easier said than done.
When things are going well, big-kid underwear is almost a given. Need to buy toilet paper and cleaning supplies? I got this. Light bulb in the kitchen needs to be changed? Piece of cake—I’m an independent woman. Co-worker being an asshat? My road’s so high, you can call me Snoop Dog.
Then there are moments when it gets tough. Real tough: a loved one gets sick, your relationship ends in a blindside, or you just really have no fucking clue what you’re doing with your life. These are the moments when you realize just how big big-girl panties actually are.
After months of these undergarments being a given, I’ve had to rely on them more than usual recently. And it has not been easy. They stayed metaphorically hitched between my ankles and knees for a good week until I realized that, as much as it was gonna suck to pull them on, I needed to. (Disclaimer: even when you finally bolster the courage to put them on, there will be moments when you want to take them off, or when they will involuntary slide back down.)
Being a grown-assed human isn’t easy. Pillow forts, colouring books, and dramatic exits are comfortable defaults, but big-girl panties exist for a reason: the things in life worth having require them. We need them to fight for the good, overcome the bad, and know when to walk away. The reality is that putting on big-girl panties takes a lot of strength, more strength than we think we possess. But we put them on anyway. And most of the time, we surprise ourselves with just how strong we actually are.