But the problem with battling yourself is that even if you win, you lose. At some point - scarred, and exhausted - you either accept that you must become a woman - that you are a woman - or you die. This is the brutal root truth of adolescence - that it is often a long, painful campaign of attrition. Those self-harming girls, with the latticework of razor-cuts on their arms and thighs, are just reminding themselves that their body is a battlefield. If you don’t have the stomach for razors, a tattoo will do; even just the lightning snap of the earring gun in Claire’s Accessories. There. There you are. You have dropped a marker-pin on your body, to reclaim yourself, to remind you where you are: inside yourself. Somewhere. Somewhere in there.