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

by Kate Kennedy

When I think about my millennial existence, I long for when others’ approval was none of my business, and being a kid afraid of blacktop knee skids long before I turned to magazines that told me black tops would make me look slim.

“I’m with the band!,” I’d swear as I swung my Vera Bradley bag over my shoulder, because nothing gives a groupie an edge quite like mature floral quilting.

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

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.

Even if it’s at the expense of the work speaking for itself, you start to prioritize preventative qualifiers that get lengthier and lengthier, usually as a result of the painful experience of people misunderstanding your intentions or requiring your work to cater to their individual needs to be allowed to exist.

the devil works hard, but capitalism works harder.

How dare they criticize the way we’ve chosen to decorate the boxes they’ve put us in? 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.

The older I get, I guess I’m still playing truth or dare in a sense; I’m trying to sit in my truth, but some days I dare to ask if that truth was ever mine to begin with.

I couldn’t help but wonder, all this time, was I empowered by the girl’s world I found within the walls of Limited Too? Or did those walls uphold yet another ceiling for what they wanted us to believe we were Limited To?

But I think the thing that makes me teary-eyed is how female bonding rituals shape-shift over time, and even though they evolve to support one another depending on the life stage, things are never quite the same.

it’s interesting how much things change when outside forces like technology or church or boys or grades start to slowly poke holes in your inflatable dreams that once made you feel uplifted. But it makes me even more grateful for these shared moments early on, and the luxury of naïveté that allowed us to exist in a state of mutual support that tinted life’s unknowns with hopefulness more than helplessness.

But that’s the thing about girlhood. You and your friends have to take yourselves seriously, because no one else will. We had to keep our emotional behavior to diary pages and fangirl in private, performing at sleepovers on our trundle stages, because it felt like the rest of the world worked overtime to remind us that girlish things were inherently unserious.

it was the adults in the room who would comfortably allow minors to feel ashamed and dirty for their consensual curiosities by feigning a safe space for them to confess their private lives to the group as a form of testimony. It wasn’t a safe space at all, and their private details were made into a needlessly shameful centerpiece so their peers could dine on their despair.

Hot tip: if you notice senior leadership manufacturing connection among strangers via confessions, run. It’s not community-building, it’s trauma-bonding.

Now I see the irony in going to youth group one day after another, and we all looked like each other and talked about loving one another while making people who weren’t like us feel not loved but othered.

when you’re taught to tie your actions, appearance, or sexuality to your self-worth or the fate of your soul at a young age, even when you’re past intellectually believing in it, you don’t lose the shelving that holds on to guilt and shame.

As troubling as a lot of my memories are, the high points remind me that despite all the manipulation, guilt, fear, and confusion, I was always true to my core self. I love getting invited onto boats, I love live music, and I love to sleep in. This is my trinity, welcome to my church.

I may never see you at the pole, but these experiences will forever make you see me at the polls, voting out people who have the audacity to think their religious beliefs should impede upon people’s rights and autonomy.

At the time, if you weren’t a Horse Girl, you were a Dolphin Girl, or at the very least an Orca Girl, likely with a well-known ambition to pursue the official cool-girl answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” in elementary school: a marine biologist.

Diamonds are cool, but have you ever come home to a fresh pack of midrange office pens?

I think many of us are familiar with the popularly held image of a Y2K queen, but I think that’s more of a SoCal starlet than a homecoming queen from 2000s high-school Americana. You know the gal; she’s likely in a Juicy tracksuit, wearing Uggs, maybe in a low-rise pocketless denim with a tiny purse, a Playboy Bunny–sticker tan line peeking out from the lower left hip, a bedazzled flip phone in her pocket so she won’t miss her “ride or die”’s texts.

You can’t win ’em all, and I had to learn the hard way that it’s okay to not be having the time of your life when everyone else is.

she shared a particular finding from her research that stuck out to me: 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.

Since the 2016 election, I don’t know how to exist without being in a state of feeling heated, with my general disposition at a light simmer, usually dialing up to a rolling boil by the time I pass Mario Lopez on channel 00 to get to the news.

what’s popular in history books and the mainstream media hasn’t always been written in girls’ handwriting

no 2000s pregame was complete without a Chi straightener balancing precariously on a porcelain sink while

I spent so many nights panfrying my hair with a flat iron at different women’s houses that my noticing how often they were hazardously left on is quite literally the pillar upon which my entire career stands.

For a casual apartment hang, you might straighten your side bang, but to go out-out to a bar after, you may feel like teasing it straight back into what we called a “pouf,” which was basically one-eighth of an updo.

the night before, I had been introduced to a beverage called 99 Bananas, the official drink of people who don’t know better and will never do it again.

the hopefulness found within the walls of a pregame was electric and promising in ways the bar scene never was.

The true mascot of a 2000s pregame? One of my favorite millennial artifacts of all: the “going-out top.”

Our battle cry was “YOLO.” Our shoes were Payless BOGO. Our expectations were as high as the tops’ price points were low. And night after night, we’d watch our dignity and hems rip at the seams from fashions faster than the speed of light.

A core memory for me is looking down at my feet to find a drenched bell-bottom that would make you think I was playing hopscotch in a swamp.

I really think this lack of technological advancement took the edge off the added pressure of needing to broadcast how much fun you’re having live. 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’m also a human who is healing and wants to be told I’m, like, really pretty, because when it comes to why I don’t always believe that I am, I don’t think I’m the only one to blame.

I see myself as both a perpetrator and a victim of the things that motivated me at the time, like diet culture, narrow beauty standards, and peddling the party-girl dream to make everyone want to join my proverbial team. I try to see it both ways, because when we criticize social media, we’re quick to blame the “highlight reel” or the women showing their bodies or their fitness routines or what they eat in a day. Just like we’re quick to blame the women who peddle wet leggings with holes in them or predatory essential oils who were told it was the secret to changing their lives. But we’re pointing to symptoms, not at all the root causes. Vulnerable people fall for systems that keep them oppressed, and they may sell the pink Cadillac, but they were never the ones behind the wheel.

I don’t remember the places we went out to, I don’t remember the parties, but I never forgot the pregames because that was the time we were focused on each other. Back in the daybed, friendship got you through the night, but in college, it got me through the nightmare of feeling like I was the reason for missing out on the best days of my life, unknowingly experiencing them in the moments while we were waiting to go somewhere else.

Going out-out, we always hoped the night would be one for the books, but we were too quick to write off our girlish pregame paradise, as if it only served as the prequel to social functions involving men. But in my book, let the record show that I think we had it backward. The moments we supported each other when we were barely getting by are the memories I cherish more than the parties that came and went. They may have wanted us to believe we were just the opener, but all this time, maybe we were the main event.

As far as I’m concerned, there are two types of people in the world regarding sensitivity: those who watched the second Titanic VHS from the box set during a rewatch, and those who never touched it following their first viewing.

it is that it’s incredibly easy for me to hold on to good memories, but incredibly challenging for me to hold on to good feelings. They pass right through me, and misery loves the company of my brain. Maybe that’s why I hold on to the good memories so tightly, as my reflection upon them gives me the good feelings I couldn’t always manufacture in real time.

I remember feeling so frustrated that during special occasions or milestones or in good company, I’d theoretically be doing something that made me happy, but I couldn’t control if I was in a good or bad mood and it was hard to shake. I remember listening to Sheryl Crow on the radio and hearing the lyrics “If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?” And I didn’t know why she had to call me out like that.

It’s something so tragic, so unimaginable, that to this day when people ask me where I went to college, I sometimes pretend I didn’t hear them, because people ask questions about it like I wasn’t there, forgetting one person’s detached true-crime curiosity is another person’s tragedy.