“It” Girl

In the movie Tag, a cast of man-children play catch.

Their specific game of Tag began when they were kids and never really ended, and so we, the audience, are treated to a 100 minutes of grown men doing amateur parkour — the only difference being that these men now have access to bank accounts and, apparently, the funds to spare on jet-setting around different cities in literal pursuit of their friends.

They are all fairly terrible at running except for Jerry, the fastest man-child, played by Jeremy Renner. Jerry has never been “it” since the game’s inception, largely because of the excessive degree of violence he is willing to descend to when cornered. (“He goes feral and turns into some kind of crazy wild animal,” is what a voiceover supplies as we watch a montage of Renner smashing things.) At the end of the film, Hoagie (Ed Helms), instigator and lead man-child, is revealed to have cancer, Jerry lets himself become “it,” and the comedy film romps home to a heartwarming, if predictable, meditation on the immutability of friendship.

I think about Tag more often than I should. It is surely not because of the gaggle of middle-aged men taking abuse that their beleaguered, brittle bodies cannot afford, although this is indeed something that proves cathartic for myself at the ripe old age of twenty-two. Instead, I think of Isla Fisher, who plays Hoagie’s girlfriend Anna.

Anna is loud, brash, and competitive. All she wants to do is be a part of their game, but the men won’t let her. This is not machismo at play, but instead, the fear that she does not know when to concede as a gentleman would. “Stop bringing your wife into this, man,” says one of the boys to Hoagie. “She’s way too intense for the game.”

In her desire to be one of the boys, Anna reminds me of myself. In primary school, we used to run a game of freeze tag every recess. I use “run” deliberately: it was a coordinated effort that required real managerial prowess. At its largest, the game spanned six classes and involved over 30 kids, spawning a Lord-of-the-Flies-esque industrial prison complex in the middle of the basketball court, taggers herding the tagged into a guarded square while the untagged attempted to break them out.

I was about 12 and on the track team. Though I was still taller than most of the boys, I could see the beginning of the end: voices were cracking and the boys were beginning to stretch out, like bean sprouts dunked in water. Instead of flat-out sprinting away, I was forced to employ trickery, swerving between the buses in the car park to avoid getting caught. Freeze tag, and PE lessons, for that matter, were no longer a game — the clock was ticking, I could feel it, as the gap between me and my pursuers narrowed. I lived like an NFL player who had suffered two concussions and was on a collision course for a third, desperately hanging on with the best of them, dreading the moment I would inevitably be caught.

I admit that it’s ridiculous, but believe me when I say that being washed up at freeze tag was a genuine fear that preoccupied every fiber of my tweenage being. Pre-pubescent me was a bull in a china shop, pinballing about the place and bulldozing most things in my path, gregarious to the point of aggression. Still, it was okay because that trait was translated into an athletic competence on the track; my physicality was good for something, at least.

But beyond that, coming up against my physical limitations was also the end of a naive delusion that I was invincible. I had lived my life, to a point, believing that if I tried hard enough, I could outrun and outjump anything that came at me. I wanted to be one of the boys because I was viciously competitive, but also because I had never been trapped as “it” — not really.

Sure, I had been tagged before. Such was the nature of playing the game every recess; getting caught was a statistical inevitability. But I had always been able to tag someone back; it was only a matter of time before I chased someone down. Being “it”, I believed fervently, was a state that I had agency over, and as puberty steamrolled closer and closer, I felt myself being backed into a corner, with no way of escaping.

***

Almost a decade on and the word “it” has been swept up in a wholly different campaign, this one led by the chronically online to identify “It Girls.” The It Girl is anachronistic; although only recently reemerging into the online consciousness, its origins come from almost a century ago, used to describe Clara Bow in the 1927 film “It.”

“It,” the film informs us, is a “quality possessed by some, which draws all others with its magnetic force.” Today, this term is used to refer to some ineffable, enviable quality possessed by certain women. When I think of the It Girl, she isn’t quite on a pedestal but instead floats along, never deeming to touch the floor; she lives among us but is not concerned with matters as frivolous as gravity.

I nurture many delusions within myself, but one which I never housed was that I could be an It Girl. By the time the term was introduced to my lexicon, I had long since hung up my running spikes. It was one of many things that I had learned to let go of, chief among them the belief that I was impervious to all harm. Not only had I been tagged multiple times, but I’d also been pushed down onto the sidewalk and stomped on, viciously, by puberty and rejections and life in general.

There was a nagging uncertainty in my mind about what exactly “it” was, and the dawning realization that I would not, in fact, be able to achieve anything I set my mind to, despite what had been peddled by well-meaning adults. As I grew up, what “it” was got tangled in the endless calculus of what was right and what was wrong, the knowledge that some dreams would be sacrificed in pursuit of new ones, and that one could spend their entire lives chasing “it” before realizing they were running after the wrong thing altogether.

There is a flourishing market for online guides on becoming an It Girl, from Instagram slides advising girls to drink matcha and carry out hot girl walks to articles with affiliate links to heatless curlers and gua sha rollers to TikToks directing viewers on makeup tutorials to look beautiful without looking like you were wearing any makeup at all. And yet these guides will never work, for what “it” is exactly remains nebulous and unattainable, precisely because actively attempting to attain “it” means that the subject in question is trying too hard. To be an It Girl is the very antithesis of meritocracy; you either have it or you don’t.

This ran counter to everything that I had learnt playing tag on those red hard courts as a kid, a betrayal of the hours I had spent running around the rubber track and the lactic acid that would accumulate in my quads as I forced tired legs onto another bend. The notion that one didn’t need to try to have it all was a new and frightening way of conceiving the world, and one that I was not entirely sure I appreciated. After all, I was an Anna, and Anna wanted things too openly and too desperately to be an It Girl.

Designating the It Girl an aspiration was a path that would only lead to despair. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe that I didn’t want to be an It Girl, but instead had a strong enough sense of self-preservation to know that I did not want to try. My mother and my little sister both had brief stints as models, a feat my mother was assured I could replicate “if you wanted to be one.” It was a theory I decided not to test out for my own sanity. Growing up has meant knowing that some things are not meant to be pursued.

***

After arriving to college, I began going on slow jogs by the Charles. It has taken me three years to turn jogging into a functional pastime; back home when running next to the road, I would instinctively speed up every time a car passed by, animated by some perverse desire to outrun a vehicle. Either way, I learned to jog as I learned to demand less and less, both from the world and from myself.

For a lot of my life, running was in pursuit of an “it” — a medal, a faster time, the approval of a coach or a friend or personal glory. Jogging puzzled me until I realized that I didn’t need to have the perfect run or an exact route mapped out every time I put on my running shoes. I could just follow the river.

I’ve been learning to be okay with letting things happen to me. Playing tag taught me what it felt like to chase something as if it was the only thing in the world that mattered; the It Girl taught me to be okay with not having it all.

I think that some part of me is still, and will always be, searching for something — a feeling, a person, an experience. In a game of Tag, there never truly is an end; whoever is “it” simply gives up the chase. A question that I have is how to know when to quit. I don’t know if I’ll ever have the answer.

But in the meantime, I’ll lace up my shoes, go for a jog, maybe stop at a bridge if I’m tired. If I’m really lucky, maybe one day I won’t need to run at all.

—Staff writer Angelina X. Ng can be reached at angelina.ng@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinaxng.