There’s a quote by Lorde that says: Even when I was little, I knew that teenagers sparkled. I knew they knew something children didn’t know, and adults ended up forgetting.
I thought I would never forget how it felt to be a teen. Every emotion was intense, everything I lived was either the best or the worst I’d ever had, and I was discovering myself at the same time I was discovering the world. It all felt very profound, even though now I look back at it with different eyes and I realize everything I wrote back then was shallow, and a bit narrow-minded. Also very cliché.
I want to hug that young version of myself that was full of innocence and desperate to know herself, but also I want to laugh in her face a little, because she was so concerned about things that never really mattered…
And now I laugh and cringe when I scroll and read: Are you deer pretty or bunny pretty? Are you an okokok girl or a lalala girl? Are you boy pretty or girl pretty? Every day there’s a new trend, a new category in which you have to fit, and suddenly you cannot just be “pretty”: you’re either fox pretty, bunny pretty, cat pretty, deer pretty, boy pretty, girl pretty… the list goes on.
I remember there was a time (in my mind, not so long ago), when Tumblr was to teens what TikTok is now. And, for some reason, I felt like my personality had to be perfectly curated and displayed in my blog. Everything had to “match” my aesthetic, everything had to seem perfect (within the micro-labels I had defined for my silly little life). If it didn’t then it wasn’t worth showing.
Why did we need to label ourselves to the point where every little thing we do had to correspond to an aesthetic, or a label, or a brand that we created for our persona?
Now, even though things have changed a bit regarding social media and digital spaces, it all comes down to the same-old endless scrolling, perfectly curated feeds, perfectly curated lives, everything in its place at all times with no breaks from these boundaries we’ve set-for what purpose?
I guess I forgot why I wanted to label myself so badly. Now I see it in others, and I can spot that I was doing the same thing, but I completely have forgotten how it felt to start to define yourself, and try to put yourself in a box, and then another box, and then another, until you feel like you have named every little part of yourself in an attempt to contain yourself within those words.
Because the world seems too big, and everyone seems to know what they are, except for you.
I can only speculate on what kind of permanent damage my teenager self would have gotten if I had grown with TikTok on my hands. I wonder if I would’ve spent hours in front of a mirror wondering if my eyes are big enough for me to claim to be bunny pretty, or if I would’ve started looking at my body differently because it looks larger than the girls bodychecking in my fyp every time I open the app. I wonder if anything would’ve been different, or if it’s all the same as what we had with Tumblr. Is the adolescent experience universal? Are these trends really new, or were we doing the same thing in a different format?
I really don’t know.
I guess I have forgotten how it felt to be a teen.