One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

Millennials aren’t rife with contradictions and allegedly falling behind because we’re these entitled, spoiled creatures. We were raised in preparation for a world that no longer exists and are forever trying to navigate the terms.

We planned our lives without a lot of information, making key life decisions more grounded in traditions, but are now in a world that’s inundated with information and, therefore, surrounded by opportunities that didn’t exist when we were planning our dreams.

The point is, I often feel too young to be taken seriously by older generations and, more recently, too old and irrelevant to be considered cool by younger generations, though lately, I’ve been wondering why we ever left the definition up to people on the outside in the first place.

In my bones, I don’t know how to not care the most.

Why would I ever let someone who drafts make-believe football teams make me believe I should be embarrassed by my interests?

Looking back on my girlhood I’m both charmed by my earnest devotion to semisexist things and horrified that they represented a set of options that seemed so comprehensive of my worldview, I didn’t even notice it was narrow. But when I think about the ever-present misogynistic trivializing of women’s interests, I also feel frustrated by the hypocrisy and want to defend all of this behavior vehemently. How dare they criticize the way we’ve chosen to decorate the boxes they’ve put us in?

Fortunately, Taylor Swift released the “All Too Well” ten-minute version in her Red (Taylor’s Version) release, and I think I speak on behalf of countless women when I say that scream-singing about someone being so “casually cruel in the name of being honest” healed a generation.

I think I learned you move forward differently after the worst thing you can ever imagine happening actually happens.

Can I call myself skinny if I’m stretched too thin?

But enforcement of the dress code rarely examined intentions; it just sexualized you by subjectively policing (and thus often discriminating against) the way clothes fit people’s bodies, disproportionately affecting some students more than others.

Social anxiety is like believing in conspiracy theories about yourself.

Now, you curate a photo or two for the whole evening, but back then, your friends would mass-upload every goddamn photo like it was a makeshift animated flip-book of the night’s least notable details. Social media wasn’t the highlight reel it is today; it was more like bad ongoing CCTV footage captioned with inside jokes.

but like our “Fearless” leader once said, “If I’m dead to you, why are you at the wake?,” you know?

At my church of snoozin’, boats, and live music, we believe God spent an equal amount of time on all of us, we don’t claim He hates the same people He creates, and we trust people to know what’s best for them because they know themselves better than our judgments ever will.

From the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. From the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.

To this day, I struggle to reconcile how you can have fun times in your life but not at all be having the time of your life.

To this day, I find it remarkable that anyone can eat, sleep, or, like, breathe knowing someone else is mad at them.

Pregnancy loss...is an open wound with the most vulnerable scab, forced to constantly replenish its surface-level protection as it's picked at daily, not by you, but inadvertently by other people's joy.

Even the phrase we are ridiculed for, “live, laugh, love,” fits into the criteria of literal retail therapy, where we would wear it and hang it all around us to be reminded of how to feel good. When you think about how widely ridiculed that phrase is, it almost makes you forget how it represents three of the most standard and important verbs of our existence: to be alive, to enjoy oneself, to love or be loved. What people forget about the commercialization of the phrase is that it peaked between 2008 and 2012, the era when many millennials postrecession were left picking up the pieces of the world we grew up expecting to inherit imploding before our eyes. We weren’t educated enough to diagnose our own depression in a financial one, so sue us for doubling down on whimsical driftwood decor. Therapy for us at the time was painted makeshift traffic signs in our homes reminding us to experience three basic human emotions.

when an experience on-screen is being represented that a viewer self-identifies with, they are more likely to cite its inaccuracy. However, when an experience or community is being represented that’s outside of the viewer’s identity, they are more likely to perceive it as being accurate.

But that’s the thing about girlhood. You and your friends have to take yourselves seriously, because no one else will.

I'm sure you're thinking, "Is she honestly trying to claim she was indoctrinated into the patriarchy due to JC (son of God) and JC (Chasez) being in cahoots to love-bomb us via Scripture and/or song, causing us to believe these unrealistic highly respectful wholesome men need to save us, thus grooming us to be deferential and 'save' ourselves for them?" Yes, yes, I am. I'm not sure it's working, but these are the things I think about in my spare time. Is this conspiracy more or less believable than blue balls? I digress.

It’s still one of my favorite movies ever, but if we can’t acknowledge they are the worst parents of all time, take me to the lakes where all the poets (and Meredith Blake almost) went to die, I don’t belong.

I’ll likely forever be seeking instead of settling into one way of thinking, but I maintain that spirituality has a lot more to do with the mutually understood contents of our soul between us and our creator than it does with controlling our earthly behaviors to appease any one modern leader’s quest for control.

People almost overcompliment you in the process of letting you down, and those are the words you’re left with to excavate once they’ve withheld further communication with you.

Gauchos were like buying curtains you didn’t measure correctly and then wearing them on your thighs.

We’ve witnessed the metamorphosis (my favorite Hilary Duff album) of technology and communication not once or twice, but year after year.

I think it’s interesting that many of us waited so long to be taken seriously, to grow up and come into our own, hopefully shedding ourselves of adolescent self-consciousness, only to enter the workforce and realize that, to our superiors, we weren’t defined by the growth we had achieved; to some people, we represented the enemy.

I’m a weird contradiction of someone who pursues and values traditions but tries to reject the parts that are oppressive

go out of your way to honor your own pleasure.