I like to think of myself as a good girl. Not perfect or absolutely unblemished, but good. Everybody’s darling. A big-hearted young female you simply got to like. One that doesn’t break hearts, or let people down, and doesn’t do things that jar with the general understanding of a good human being. Yes, when I think of myself I like to focus on the good qualities and prefer to ignore the bad ones.

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Don’t ask me why I do this exactly. I’m convinced a character is something that is assembled from both good and bad experiences over the years. And looking back on the short record of my life, I will even admit that I’ve probably learned more from my bad girl than my good girl moments. For some reason, these have formed me more. They are the ones that are mostly responsible for what I am today. So why in the world would I want to suppress them so greatly and only focus on my history as a good girl when describing myself?

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Don’t get me wrong. I mean, true, I might have stolen my sister’s chocolate Easter bunnies when we were kids and I think I once peed in a pool when I was twelve - an age when I would have been perfectly aware of my body’s urge to urinate. I’m definitely not Mother Theresa, but I’m not a bad girl either. And therefore, until recently, I’ve never forgot to tell myself that and I successfully believe it, too.

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Well, I must have thought about it too much as my bad past (that doubtlessly exists) for some reason recently decided to haunt me in my dreams. Somehow, three broken hearts (two belonging to really good male friends, one to an unholy affaire) that all go on me, managed to team up in my subconscious and torture me throughout a long night of awful screaming and terrible perspiring. They provided the living proof that my bad girl track record might still comprise a little more than just a stolen chocolate Easter bunny and a pee in a pool, and I couldn’t just let it pass by me.

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When I told my girlfriends about it, they admitted they knew what I was talking about. They also liked to think of themselves as good girls, successfully suppressing their bad past and focusing on the good. Although it made me feel better to know I wasn’t the only one polishing up their history, I could still not understand why we do this.

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Until this morning that is, when I shared a train compartment with a grandmother and her granddaughter. The grandmother was telling her granddaughter some story from her past, which immediately transported me back to my own childhood with my Grandma and her vivid anecdotes. What I never questioned until today is why all of my Grandma’s stories were always so amazingly romantic and so painfully ideal that even a high-gloss Photoshopped billboard would have turned green with envy. Was it really possible my Grandma had been this good as a girl?

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I still don’t doubt she was, hey, she’s my Grandma. But I must admit that I’ve started asking myself if she, too, might have found a way to suppress the bad and focus on the good, just as my girlfriends and I are doing today. And honestly, if my Grandma did so, I wouldn’t blame her. How drab would my childhood have been without all my Grandma’s good girl stories? So, if for nothing else, we owe it to our granddaughters to suppress the bad and keep telling ourselves that we are good girls, even if we sometimes slip up.

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Ela

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