The girls in shiny dresses

By Giovanna D. Preda Robertti

I saw my friend through pub windows tonight, and it made me cry. He had no part in this, of course, but since moving away, he has been my only reminder of my bewitched city—built on cracked pavement and contradictions. And somewhere in my small-town country reside the girls in shiny dresses, whose lives I watched through glass, just as I did his tonight.

Tonight, the girls in shiny dresses permeated my mind in all their glory, an ocean away from the land I left behind. They are like poltergeists, rising from deep slumber to haunt my thoughts in an isle of rolling green hills, whispering crude words in Asunción slang. Their power has waned to the point of unrecognition, but once upon a time, they tore at my flesh, nails deep, opening me up for the whole city to see. Once upon a time, the girls in shiny dresses stole my voice and replaced it with their own—words of unworthiness and loathing.

The most infuriating part is not that they took pieces of me but that, in the naïveté of my early teens, I had desired nothing more than to be one of them. To be skinny and shorter, to have perfect straight hair, to silence the all-consuming attacks of panic and overthinking. What truly broke me was that I gave them the power to come near me, to destroy me from within—yet I was always restrained to envying their lives from afar, through galleries of Instagram posts and hushed recountings of parties I was never invited to. Their stories were told just near enough for me to hear, in a careful, almost-loud-enough tone that gave them plausible deniability if, as intended, I overheard them.

So, I changed myself. I straightened my hair until I fried it, fell into the traps of bulimia in pathetic attempts to alter my appearance. I wore the same shiny dresses, bought the same makeup they used. But even to those unfamiliar with Gen Z teen drama, it was clear I did not belong. No matter how hard I tried, I remained a voyeur—a faithful visitor to the gallery of Instagram stories and eavesdropped gossip. One day at school, a couple of girls hid from me. I cannot recall why they were hiding, nor why it moved me so much more than all the other times they had done the same, but I called my father in tears, begging him to pick me up. That day, I had an epiphany—one I had long understood but dreaded putting into coherent thought: No amount of trying would make me belong with the girls in shiny dresses.

Slowly, I started reclaiming my identity. I let my curls return after years of straightening treatments. I allowed the nerdiness and drama that had once brought me endless mockery to define me instead. I changed schools and met other girls in shiny dresses. But I also discovered that someone else, whom I had once thought was one of them, had been masking her real self too—another careful observer of the gallery of gossip and perfect pictures. She and I became inseparable through our shared identity of being "not like other girls."

In a world where women are preyed on for everything they do and don’t do, admitting this might label me a “pick-me girl.” But that term never sat right with me. Yes, some women propagate this discourse to put others down, but my feelings of otherness were never rooted in misogyny. For most of my life, I had wanted nothing more than to be like other girls. This is the eternal struggle for most neurodivergent women—we truly are not like other girls, by virtue of our diagnosis. Finding a group of humans, regardless of gender, with whom we belong is an uphill battle.

I know the term "pick-me girl" is meant to describe a very specific type of woman who spreads the myth of self-exceptionalism for male validation. But online discourse has degraded the term so much that when we say we are "not like other girls," we are immediately ostracized, labeled pick-me’s, and denied the chance to explain ourselves.* The truth is, we just aren’t like most other people. And when you are simultaneously isolated from your peers, rewarded by society for masking your traits, and then witch-hunted if you dare say you feel different, life can take you down some really dark paths.

Neurodivergent girls already experience higher rates of victimization than boys with the same diagnosis. Our struggles are easily dismissed as “schoolgirl drama” when they are, in reality, high-concern symptoms of a patriarchal and ableist society. There’s a common, quasi-comedic phrase in autistic and ADHD communities: no one diagnoses neurodivergence as well as a school bully. When we go unmasked, neurotypical people don’t relate to us and feel less remorse bullying us than they would another neurotypical child. Girls with autism and ADHD mask their symptoms at significantly higher rates than boys, yet I have always been particularly bad at masking my ADHD. That’s why I was diagnosed at age nine—when girls are systematically underdiagnosed—despite living in a country where mental health is heavily stigmatized. My “otherness” was always obvious, yet my best friend had masked hers so well that even I had failed to recognize her as a fellow struggler.

“I said I wasn’t like other girls—and if I didn’t say it, I was always thinking it,” writes comedian Fern Brady. “But I was never saying it to show I was better than other women. All I wanted was to find out how to be like other girls, and it felt increasingly impossible. The ‘pick-me girl’ appears to me as just another way to dismiss female autistics.” When I first read Brady’s memoir, Strong Female Character, I felt deeply understood. The girls in shiny dresses—the socially adept, neurotypical women who tormented me most of my life—and their male counterparts do not care about your specific diagnosis, or lack thereof. If you clearly don’t fit into what society deems acceptable for your perceived role, you are othered all the same.

After becoming close with my now-best friend, we met others in the gallery of perfect lives—watching alone and from afar, just as we once had. Many of them were neurodivergent too, but we also found queer people, fellow nerds, and others whose passions simply did not align with what was expected of them. We started frequenting the gallery less and less, until one day, we stopped completely. For the first time since childhood, I felt free. I let my inner, dramatic nerd shine through my clothing—colorful sundresses, star-printed scarves. I let my curls loose, stopped obsessing over food. My identity, for the very first time, was fully mine to explore.

All my friends have, at some point, done one of two things: either tried to adopt the shiny dress lifestyle and failed, or believed they were somehow better for rejecting it. The girls in shiny dresses, I think, are prisoners of their own upbringings—it’s hard to tear down a system when you benefit from it. But how much of that is upbringing, and how much is personal responsibility? I hold no resentment toward the first girls in shiny dresses I met in primary school; after all, we weren’t even trusted with pens—how could they have understood the long-term damage they caused? But the last ones I encountered, the ones who fat-shamed me, harassed me online, and called me slurs as we stood on the cusp of adulthood? I don’t resent them. But I also don’t think any upbringing can fully justify their actions.

And yet, I still have hope they will one day leave the shiny dresses behind. I have learned that vileness is a waste of one’s own energy—it takes far less effort to be kind. I hope they realize we were never enemies, and that our path to freedom—as individuals, as women, as people from a deeply fucked-up country—is better traversed accompanied.

And I still see them sometimes, in the amber of morning mate, in the foam of night beers. I see them through glass windows and foggy memories of a thousand lives past. I have found my people. I no longer envy them. I hope that someday they realize the real enemy was not a girl who went on long tangents about astronomy with no grain of self-restraint, but the thing telling them I was a threat in the first place. I really hope their lives turn out great, by whatever their metrics may be. But, sometimes, the little bees of thought, buzzing through the darkest corners of my mind, see a boy through pub windows and start asking me, albeit quietly: Why can’t you be like the girls in shiny dresses? Why is belonging so hard?