The quirky girl is a girl who trusts life to its fullest. She is the girl who sits on the floor in the middle of the street because she knows her clothes wont get dirty and no one will trample her. She is the girl who leaves her purse on her chair at Starbucks while she uses the restroom because she knows no one will steal it. The world has her back. There are people looking out for her and she knows it. The quirky girl in our society can only be a white woman.

As women of color, we know better. Have been taught better by life. Not only is it easier for the world to distrust us, but the world does not have our best interests in mind. We never learned to trust the world because the world never trusted us. The feeling is mutual.

Brown girls can’t act on the full meaning of eccentric or quirky. Openly smoking weed and having a messy life is not cool or admirable for us; just careless and disastrous. We rarely leap without looking down, for if there happens to be a heap of nails below there is rarely anyone close enough with the necessary resources to stop our fall. We also know through experience that what awaits us below is more often a bed of nails and not a plush, queen-sized mattress.

We come from a world where not being good at something and trying anyway is not fearless, but a waste of time.

The quirky girl like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s lights a woman’s hat on fire as she carelessly smokes at a party, knowing that someone nearby will put it out with little effort, then proceeds to live her life without even noticing. Or leaves a lit match with articles of clothing. Without the firefighters in her life, the story of Hepburn’s character would have made for a much darker film.

In order for brown girls to claim the quirky girl status, we must start by building a community where we feel safe. And by letting the world know by peace or by force that we deserve moments where we can be carefree without the world collapsing at our feet. We deserve to take small breaks from ourselves before our big breaks without having a sugar daddy to act as an adult security blanket.

The quirky girl is white feminism incarnate. It is living life with the full knowledge that you are living above a safety net surrounded by those who are ready to catch you before you even get the chance to fall.

Those who try too hard to feel special envy the adversities we go through everyday. They preach equality, but never want to do the work. The daily work of uplifting and physically helping those with lesser opportunities for reasons out of our control. Because deep down inside they envy us for being different. They want us to make and do good, but never more or better than them.