Caitlin Moran, persuasive fountain of feministic encouragement, spoke to Alexandria Symonds at Interview about the big payoff she got after confessing all of the weird things that make up a life. The payoff is that you discover everyone is weird. In her words:
There’s so many girls like us, that’s the thing. I’ve spent all my life thinking that I’m weird, and I must be the only one who’s kind of bleeding and wanking, with [gestures to her hair] hair, and have dreams of being noble and not just suffering. When I did How to Be a Woman, it felt like kind of a risk to be like, “Well, these are the things I do.” But when that book came out, everyone was like, “But no, I’m like that too!” You suddenly realize that rather than being a single, weird, lonely, freaky lady, that there’s millions of us—there’s a nation of girls like us, and it’s a beautiful thing to connect….
You think you’re going to be open to ridicule if you start talking about your periods, masturbation, your abortion, your secret love affair, your eating disorder, or your love of ABBA or of Crowded House. It goes back to what we started talking about, where everyone goes, “Well, that’s not a secret at all. I love that, too!” The big secret is that there doesn’t need to be any secrets. If you tell your secrets, there will always be at least one person who’ll go, “Oh, thank God you said it! We can all be truthful now as well.”
Everyone divulge one weird thing every day until there are no weird things and everyone can stroll about footloose and secret-free and fancy-free. More on this plan and other notes (like good birds to model makeup after) in the whole, wonderful interview here.