Embracing Femininity as a Late Bloomer: 26 and Never Had My First Kiss?!

Written By Caroline Smith

How do you go from being scared to show and embrace your femininity, to fully embracing it and sharing it’s power with the world? As a late bloomer myself, I know exactly how it feels to be in this predicament, so much so that I’m 26 years old and haven’t had my first kiss nor my first boyfriend, if you can believe that! But despite those surprising facts, I have a more confidence in my feminine traits than I’ve ever had before. I went from hating my body so much that I would wear an XL black jacket everywhere I went, to fully embracing my physical and nonphysical qualities as a woman, and now I want you to feel the same way.

This episode explores how to embrace your femininity after a life of trying to hide it from the world. We’re going to talk about my own experience with embracing my feminine side, what femininity even is, and the 6 ways I believe you can completely embrace your feminine nature without letting others take advantage of it — plus one bonus tip.

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Transcript:

Welcome to The Introverted Misfit Podcast with me, Caroline Smith, where we discuss topics related to the human experience of connection and communication with a slightly awkward, introverted twist.

In today’s podcast episode, we are going to explore a topic that is very near and dear to my heart, and that is embracing your femininity after a life of trying to hide it from the world. We’re going to talk about my own experience with embracing my feminine side, what femininity even is, and the 6 ways I believe you can completely embrace your feminine nature without letting others take advantage of it, because there are some things to watch out for in this type of journey, especially when you’re a late bloomer.

One thing I’ve noticed in my novice-level expertise as a gardener is that when you plant something, like tomatoes or cucumbers, the fruit doesn’t come all at once; they mature at different times.

Some fruit will be ready to harvest in a little over a month, and others won’t even start to develop until 3 months into the growing season.

In my case, I’m one of those fruits that wasn’t ready until the last few days of summer, so much so that at the time I’m sitting down to record this episode, I’ve managed to reach this age without even having my first kiss or my first boyfriend, if you can believe that!

I don’t even know for certain if that’s out of the ordinary especially for my generation, so do me a favor and comment when you had your first kiss so that I know if I’m just that late to the party.

I have a pretty solid justification for why my life has turned out this way, and I’m sure if you clicked on this podcast episode you will be able to relate to at least some parts of my story.

It’s because I’m not really “normal” and I wasn’t a “normal” girl growing up.

I’ve talked a lot about my experience with being on the autism spectrum and the resulting social anxiety that my disorder caused for many years, but I’ve never really talked about it in relation to my experience specifically as a woman.

For a long time, I HATED my female body.

The reason that I hated it was because as someone who simultaneously was autistic and struggled with social anxiety, the one thing I was constantly trying to avoid was attention, and yet the one part of me that was getting me a lot of unwanted attention was my body.

So, to compensate, I wore an XL black jacket pretty much everywhere I went.

In fact, I remember being in my high school’s marching band practice outside, and in the dead heat of summer on black pavement, I had on long pants and a black jacket, while everybody else was more comfortably dressed.

This phase of completely covering every feminine curve I could lasted from middle school through my early college days, at which point I slowly started to venture out, even though it was still hard because I was still in the throws of my battle with social anxiety.

In hindsight, I realized that amongst all of the mental chaos I was going through, a common theme in my life was that I believed I was unworthy of even the smallest amount of attention, and as a result, that’s how I moved through the world.

I even remember in my senior year of high school, I got asked to prom, and because I had not really gotten attention from boys — because again, I was intentionally avoiding any kind of social interaction —I automatically thought that he had to be joking or pranking me, so I was actually kind of mean to him when I turned him down, because I was just so convinced that he could not be serious.

That’s how low my self-esteem was at that point.

And what hurt my self-esteem even more, even past high school into my college days, was just watching how easily other girls could talk to and flirt with boys.

I just couldn’t do that — partly because of my lack of confidence, and partly because of my social struggles due to having autism.

But now that I’m on the other side of being afraid of my feminine side, I think I’ve got some useful advice for you in regards to becoming more confident in all aspects of your feminine nature if you’ve resonated with any part of my story thus far.

Let’s start by defining what it means to be feminine.

Femininity refers to the qualities regarded as characteristic of women.

And I think a lot of people can use the more superficial gender roles of women to define this term, but what I’m really talking about is those biological factors that are hardwired in us that make us different from men, mainly because of our hormonal differences and our physiological makeup.

I’m talking about our bodies, the natural sway of our hips, our more loving and nurturing ways, and our propensity towards being emotionally attune to others, unless of course your autistic like me and had to learn that last part about emotional attunement, but that’s a different story).

Those qualities are what help us to attract a mate if we want, from strong communities with each other, be compassionate, and raise the next generation of humans starting from when they are extremely fragile babies who need lots of sensitive, nurturing care.

That’s what femininity is: it’s a loving, nurturing energy.

And of course that does not mean that you will be like that 100% of the time, because there are some situations and life circumstances where you’ll have to pull back on those qualities, but we’ll talk about that a little later.

So, how do we get comfortable leaning into that side of us when we have been stifling it for so long?

That’s a bigger question because based on our own unique experiences and realities, that is not going to be an overnight process, but I’m going to give you the basic formula in 6 steps:

  1. Don’t try to fake being someone you’re not; be yourself.

    If you feel like you’re faking a certain kind of feminine archetype that’s completely out of character for you, it’s going to be uncomfortable for you and that discomfort will be noticeable.

    I’m going to give you a real life example of this:

    The summer before my freshman year of college, I was part of a 12-week summer camp at the university I attended, and a few days into that camp, I saw one of the girls in this camp at a pool party rubbing this guys ear very sensually.

    I know for a fact I could not do something like that, even as confident as I am now, because that is just completely out of my personality;

    I’m just not that straightforward and bold, and I know I would feel really uncomfortable doing that.

    So what I’m saying is don’t feel like you have to portray being this sultry seductress woman if that’s not comfortable for you.

    Be who you naturally are.

    If you’re kinda quirky and awkward like I am, that can be really attractive to the right man.

    Or if you’re more of a lover girl or a lady-like women. Whatever it is, it will be perfect for someone out there.

  2. Don’t be scared of the attention that you get; embrace it.

    You don’t have to be arrogant about it, but be confident in yourself.

    I said earlier in the episode that I would wear a black jacket everywhere I went to repel attention, and yes it was hiding my physical body, but I like to think that the jacket was symbolically hiding my entire feminine aura.

    And when I took the physical and symbolic jacket off, people started to notice.

    My family noticed, men noticed, women noticed, a lot of people noticed! Because my sense of self-worth inside was finally starting to show outwardly in the way I walked through the world.

    When you’re coming from a place of having to hide that confidence, the attention might be uncomfortable at first, but you just have to learn to embrace rather than being embarrassed by it.

  3. Don’t fall into the comparison trap.

    This one is a hard one particularly because of how big social media is.

    Everyone is on it all of the time and you can see airbrushed photos all of the time and you can see what people are doing in their lives.

    As women who are late bloomers, we have already spent a large portion of our lives comparing ourselves to others.

    Her hair is longer and prettier than mine, or she has a prettier face, or she’s skinnier than me, or look at how everyone admires her.

    Those same habits of comparison are often roadblocks as we are coming our of our shells, and I’m telling you from personal experience, that is not serving anyone.

    What I’ve learned is that just because someone else is attractive or has something you wish you had, that doesn’t take away from your inward and outward beauty.

    I know it doesn’t feel that way, especially if you were like me and barely got any attention, but it’s true.

    Will there be more attractive people out there? Yes, but that has nothing to do with you as an individual.

    The best version of yourself is your beauty standard, so find more meaningful things to do other than just sitting around and comparing yourself to others, especially if it’s on superficial things.

  4. Don’t be discouraged by rejection, or perceived rejection.

    Everybody has to face rejection in one way or another, in our romantic lives, in the workplace, in your family, and other sectors of life.

    It might be a friendship that didn’t work out and you don’t know if it was something you did or not.

    It might be romantic interest that wasn’t as interested in you as you thought.

    It might be a promotion that you didn’t get that you thought you deserved.

    Whatever the situation is, you can’t let those moments kill your self-esteem, because that doesn’t help anyone, especially you.

    That kind of attitude is not going to help you attract the kind of people that you want in your life.

    Instead, I like to think of rejection as a learning opportunity.

    You could learn something about how you need to operate and behave moving forward to get a better outcome.

    You could learn that you need to change the type of men or friends you’re giving your time to.

    You could learn that sometimes, people just aren’t compatible, and it’s time to move on.

    I’m not saying rejection doesn’t hurt, because it definitely does for a little while, but once you get over it and you see that the world didn’t end, it gets easier.

  5. Stop ruminating and feeling about about being a late bloomer.

    Regarding our femininity, we can sometimes sulk and feel bad about all of the years we’ve lost by hiding our feminine nature from the world, but take it from me, ruminating about the past is a surefire way to stay in a demotivated state for a long time. Much longer than you need to.

    I was talking to my sister and her husband about this issue of me being a late bloomer a while ago, and my brother-in-law told me, “You’re life has turned out exactly the way you needed it to for you and your circumstances,” and I think that’s a great outlook to have, because it’s true!

    This is your life, not someone else’s, so you can’t keep expecting it to turn out like someone else’s, and especially not on the same timeline.

    Everyone is different, came from different circumstances, had different things happen to them in the past, made different mistakes they wish they could go back and change, and all of that has led to exactly where you are today.

    You can’t change that, but you can make decisions today that will give you a chance at a better future where you can be your most confident self.

  6. I have one last point to give you, and it’s more of a word of caution to you as you’re entering this journey of being a newly confident woman: Know when to withdraw your feminine energy from people who don’t value it.

    And I’m telling you this because you might be very vulnerable to certain situations that most other women have already encountered and know how to handle.

    I said earlier that the strengths in your feminine energy is very powerful, and the strength lies in your loving, nurturing, and caring abilities, but that also makes it much easier for others to take advantage of that part of you if you’re not careful.

    And really, both men and women are capable of this.

    You have to know when to pull the reigns in when you realize you’re giving the wrong people access to that side of you, number one because you’ll get your feelings hurt very badly, and number two you can find yourself in quite the predicament if you’re not careful.

    I’ve met many women who because their self-worth combined with them being too freely-giving of themselves, they are in very miserable situations; situations that are really hard to get out of once you’ve been in them for a while.

    There’s another aspect of this point that I want to tell you: once something becomes too readily available on the market, it loses it’s bargaining power.

    So basically, too many people get free access to your feminine qualities — not just physical, but all of it — it become objectively less valued by others.

  7. BONUS: I do have one last bonus tip that I want to throw in, just because I think it’s important.

    Dress for success. That means dressing in way that makes you feel beautiful both inside and out so that others can see the level of care you have for yourself, and dressing for the type of attention you want from romantic interests.

    I wanted to throw this point in because I remember when I was still in the middle of having severe social anxiety, I would sometimes purposefully dress really badly so that no one would want to talk to me.

    So I wouldn’t do my hair, and I would just wear extremely baggy clothing that didn’t flatter me at all, and I definitely got what I wanted, because usually no one would try and talk to me, but I was also doing myself a disservice because I didn’t feel good about how I looked.

    And when I did finally start to dress like I cared about myself, I got much different attention and treatment than what I previously experienced, from both men and women.

    I think because people could tell that I respected myself by the way I dressed, they were more inclined to give me respect.

    Whereas before, if I walked out of the house looking kind of raggedy, I was NOT happy with the kind of attention I got, mainly from men.

    It’s almost like because I looked like kind of sloppy in the way that I dressed, they thought I must be easy, and all of that really changed when I started dressing like I cared about myself.

    By the way, that doesn’t mean that you need to wear heels and a dress just to go to the grocery store, but it just means that you should look put together, whether you’re wearing casual loungewear, gym clothes, or jeans and t-shirt, or anything.

    Dress like you take good care of yourself, and dress for the type of attention that you want.

If you’re a woman who is just beginning your journey to becoming more confident in yourself, I know exactly how scary and vulnerable this time in your life can be, but I promise once you can build your confidence in not only your feminine qualities but also your general qualities as a person, you’ll be able to take on the world without fear, and you’ll be one huge step closer to finding Mr. Right, if that’s your ultimate goal.

Make sure to check the description to find out how you can work with me 1-on-1 so that I can assist you on your journey to becoming a confident version of yourself, specifically as an introverted woman.

That includes my single power hour coaching sessions if you just need a quick hour to talk with me about something specific, and my signature 12-week program, Communicate with Quiet Confidence.

Again you can find all of that information using the links in the description of this episode or by going to theintrovertedmisfit.com.

That’s all for today’s episode.

As always, if you enjoyed this talk, please don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, leave a review and/or comment whether you’re tuning in on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from, and share this podcast with a friend. Thanks for listening, and have a great day!

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Caroline Smith

Caroline is the founder of The Introverted Misfit, a community committed to helping socially inept people become more socially confident in themselves.

https://theintrovertedmisfit.com
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