WhirlHOOD
At this point I think it is innately insatiable for a woman to have the hunger of a teenage girl.
To want to see the world as she did when she was 17 and didn’t know any better.
To hear stories and music and not relate them to old times but apply them to moments.
To speak with a constantly accompanying grin no matter the sadness that laid behind it. To feel. That's it–to feel without trying so hard.
In my experience, the transition from being a teenage girl to a young woman is an immediate one. All of a sudden one day we wake up and realize we will never sit in the car the same way or understand the silence like we used to. It’s a shock. To fully comprehend that in just a couple of months you will no longer be able to say you are a “teenager.” Something you have been for what feels like the majority of your life. What else do you know? How else do you know how to be or act or behave?
Adulthood is heavy and grave. Teenage girlhood is light and comforting. Even if it wasn’t–the loneliness still has this warmth to it that the chilled bite of adulthood lacks. I turn 20 in two months. And as I was asked by a colleague of mine what my birthday plans were for this year–this big, special year–I froze.
The thought of this past year being the last 12 months in my entire life I could legitimately say I was a teenage girl shocked me to my core in a way nothing else ever has. It wasn’t existential or derived from a larger fear of life and what it means and if I’m doing enough in it. No. It was that simple realization that I was growing up and I couldn’t hide behind that comforting quilt of teenage girl faults and fits. Accountability was around the corner and my immature mind still shuttered at the thought of it. However, that is when I decided to reach out and see if others felt this way.
Did other girls miss drawing stars on their hands in pen like they used to get yelled at for in physics class?
Did other girls spend every day waiting until bedtime so they could lay atop their covers and think of things that would never happen?
Did other girls wish to go back to playing outside more and using leaves as hats and sticks as wands?
Did other girls think about smoking cigarettes and drinking and doing drugs only to always be too scared to become the girls their mothers always warned them about?
Did other girls look at skimpy outfits and put scissors in their hands every other week only to never actually cut any fabric ever off?
Did other girls want to destroy themselves like I did? Did other girls want to destroy themselves like I did…
I thought that a long time ago and I think that now. I’ve always thought about it. And I, now a woman transitioning into her twenties, want to figure out if they actually did.
This is an exposition of sorts. One that will hopefully give other girls and women alike solace in their uncomfortable growing pains and provide others a sort of discomfort in the realization of what our teenage girls have to live through. All of the sexualization, gender bias, objectification, standards, emptiness. All of the hell we put them through and that they put up with. Notice I didn’t say “the hell they have to put up with;” because we allow them to put up with it.
Actually, we encourage them to.
In order to gain a more personalized and in-depth understanding of this feminine experience, explore my interview of one of my close colleagues, Lauren Weidamenn, and the sharing of her personal journey of girlhood and her thoughts as she approaches her twenties as well as my analysis and curation of feminine media in our current digital climate.
