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

by Kate Kennedy

trying to reconcile how to feel when you’re raised by a church that insisted if you leaned into who you are, you’d go to hell.

if somebody asked me, “How many Fs do I give?” the answer would be all of them. About everything. Ever. All of the time. Friendship, feelings, fandoms, fitting in, feminism. In my bones, I don’t know how to not care the most.

I was, and always have been, with the bandwagon.

I would take cues from popular media and popular kids in school to curate a version of me that was not defined by what I liked, but by finding ways to get people to like me.

I think a lot of us now look back and cringe about many of the things we did to fit in, forgetting we grew up during a time when it seemed like avoiding being unique at all costs was the right thing to do.

I wanted to make other people feel comfortable, and I felt okay only if someone else told me it was okay, if my outfit got okayed, or if I made sure they’re okay with me being there.

At many points, we experienced a harsh pop-cultural backdrop that was especially unforgiving toward women, and it took me several years to even recognize it as wrong.

Find a job you love, and you’ll never work another day!

To be fair, every generation has its unfair stereotypes and weaponizing of differences; it’s human nature to feel like you know better than younger people with less life experience.

Even though it may look different depending on our respective environments, we share the experience of navigating formative years of girlhood alongside a social and cultural landscape that shapes us and stares at us, forever existing between looking out at the world and being painfully aware that we’re being looked at.

And wonder where those stickers are now They fell off, but the need for validation stuck around

the holy-grail hot-girl scents: Cucumber Melon, Warm Vanilla Sugar, and Sweet Pea.

I knew two things about myself from a young age: I have difficulty falling asleep, and I live for a top-notch heart-to-heart.

I will say I’m here for the preteen witch vibes.

This is why I am comfortable with my children being iPad kids; leaving us to our own devices before we had devices was more of a medical risk than a character-building exercise.

I’m nothing if not a slut for a back scratch.

their friendship makes me wish there was a word for platonic soulmates. But it couldn’t be more true that after you’re sleepover-aged, everyone’s life goes drastically different ways, and communication ebbs and flows between weeks and months where everyone’s independence is the reason being unreachable teeters on the cusp of eventually falling out of touch entirely.

Sometimes when we get together now, we laugh about how seriously we took ourselves. But that’s the thing about girlhood. You and your friends have to take yourselves seriously, because no one else will.

As I’ve come to appreciate in retrospect, it was also kind of a safe space for trying on different versions of myself at an age where I lacked a strong sense of identity.

so I could impress a boy I hadn’t met yet to maintain a relationship that did not exist is truly delusional girl-boss behavior, and I love that for me.

For all the ways people criticize social media for its drafting of keyboard warriors who take advantage of anonymity to spread cruelty, it also can eliminate a person’s self-consciousness in ways that are empowering, depending on how you use it.

Once you realize none of those things are happening, and he’s not interested, you have to regain your power.

“You see her confidence is tragic, but her intuition magic.”

I was always detailed, verbose, emotionally available, and quite literally, available. I’d get excited about a boy, talk a little too much, say hi first one too many times, and inevitably

watch them lose interest, swearing I’d show up to my next interaction as more of a mute model.

I guarantee you teenage boys were just existing while we meticulously curated our away messages, buddy info, and online behavior, using it as a billboard for our states of contentment and eligibility.

Via AIM, I was learning at a young age that as a woman, I couldn’t be too excited, available, or emotional.

I remember mapping out my route in between classes to pass him in the hall, planning my outfit and salutation with a level of effort in direct contrast to the breeziness I tried to exhibit.

That’s the thing about self-esteem; it’s not about what’s actually happening or how anybody objectively looks. It’s about how you feel, and it’s often a function of how you’re treated by other people.

Eventually, I tried to stop asking questions about all the ways I wasn’t worth the time in God’s eyes and asked myself what would happen if I spent a little less time on God and a little more time on myself.

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

one trait I’ve observed about Gen Z online is their celebration and prioritization of identity and individuality, which I applaud. We’re now in the era of the personal brand.

You finally found your identity in the friendships you made and the goods you could attain, but you are now expected to know who you are without them.

The underestimated eighties and nineties Valley girls walked so Elle Woods could teach us about ammonium thioglycolate.

maybe I wouldn’t have needed to be saved by The Bell Jar if Saved by the Bell had contextualized Jessie’s disposition more accurately.

In conclusion, part of why I say all this is because what’s popular in history books and the mainstream media hasn’t always been written in girls’ handwriting (or regular writing or screenwriting). There’s a long history of women being written out of the narrative (or of different groups of women being incorrectly written into it from an oppressor’s perspective), and what matters going forward is who is doing the writing, who dictates the variety of stories told and the perspectives considered. What’s important is that all girls (not just the “popular” ones) keep writing if it interests them, whether working on their handwriting or writing their stories in a way that will allow them to be shared with the world, because they deserve to be heard and better understood.