You know, sometimes I wonder why, even after all these years of storytelling, people still don't know how to write women characters. I mean they do write women but not the real kind anyway, not the kind you and I know, the kind who feel a thousand things at once, who are soft and brutal in the same breath, who can cry for a stranger and still hold a grudge against a friend for something petty, something tiny, something that doesn't make sense to anyone else but lives inside us like a splinter we don't want to pull out.
And what hurts more is that when they do write women, we're either saints or sinners, either the villain who is ugly or the wide-eyed girl who always knows the right thing to do, and I can't help but feel like we're being stripped of everything in between. Like the contradictions or the charm of being a little bit messy and a little bit mean and not having to apologize for it.
Confessions of a Petty Girl is my way of reclaiming that space, of letting Nina, this young woman who could be any of us or all of us, say the things we think but never write down, of letting her walk us through the grudges she held for too long, the overreactions she never explained, the friendships she ruined over eye-rolls and unspoken insecurities, and all the little moments that seem silly in hindsight but shaped her anyway.
It's written like she's whispering it all to an imaginary friend who won't judge her, someone who gets that sometimes we want to be loved deeply and other times we just want to win the argument, that our pettiness isn't something to be erased but something to be understood as part of our texture, part of the way we process hurt, anger, love, and longing in a world that rarely allows us the room to be anything other than digestible.
So here it is—Nina's diary, full of jagged memories and sharp observations, full of people who might feel too familiar and moments that might sting a little, and I hope as you read it, you feel what I felt writing it: that there's power in being petty and that there's beauty in being complicated.