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

by Kate Kennedy

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

Per the canon of the board game Mall Madness, I knew that the only way to lose after a day at the mall is not to buy anything.

but when you’re inside a box and don’t know any better, it looks a lot like freedom.

I find there’s great irony in how society aggressively promotes the same things to girls they ultimately shame them for caring about, like growing up surrounded by media that taught us to only care about boys, clothes, and shopping, only to be told you’re vapid if you’re boy crazy, love fashion, and hang out at the mall.

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

When you’re in middle or high school, popularity can feel like everything, but once you’re out of it, it’s a weird thing to pathologize, and no one really talks about it unless it’s in the context of being an irrelevant metric.

Now I often feel like I’m captioning moments I want to share before they’re even captured; social media subliminally makes me engineer moments before experiencing them in ways I resent.

I felt like I was lied to about finding “a job you love and you’ll never work another day,” because I followed a job I loved and I hadn’t stopped working since.

This trend continues today, where women’s interests are easily ridiculed or sidelined despite their economic viability, as evidenced by romance novels consistently outselling other fiction genres, yet being referred to as “trashy novels,” or reality TV dominating ratings, while their predominantly female audiences are labeled as partaking in a “guilty pleasure.”

I am able to take a joke, I just no longer laugh at the ones that aren’t funny.