This is a phrase you might have been hearing twenty-some-year-olds say along the lines of, “I’m just a 22-year-old teenage girl, I don’t know what to do.” To be honest, I’ve caught myself saying these words myself. You might be asking, “Why?” Well, to be honest, I still feel like a teenage girl. For some of us, the latter years of our teens were stripped away from us due to the global pandemic, and for others, the transition from the teenage years to the twenties was too abrupt to process. Now that we find ourselves beginning our careers, navigating adult realtionships, and entering a phase of life that almost seems foreign, it’s nice to remind ourselves that the teenage girl that longed for this life is still in there.
Artists like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Miley Cyrus, Renee Rapp, and Lizzy McCalpine create music to soothe the soul of that teenager with her corded headphones and Tiger Beat Posters scattered all over her room. There is something about girl anthems and heart-wrenching ballads that connect you to this younger version of yourself. In addition, the release of the Barbie movie this past summer awakened that child in all of us, the one longing to be seen and wanted in a room, and to recognize the love blooming inside of us that had been smothered with acid rain.
I saw this trend on Tik Tok to print out a picture of your younger self and hang it on the bathroom mirror. Each morning and night, that will be the first image you see when you wake up, and last one before you go to sleep (other than you doom scrolling on your phone). This allows you to remind yourself that this little girl on your mirror dreamed to be where you are today. Even if it isn’t exactly where you thought you’d be, the little girl who longed to live a life surrounded by love is squealing with glee. You quite literally cannot let her down (unless you're a mass muderer, but then there would be a completely different conversation to be had), so why silence her? You only have one life, so follow those dreams and take the chances! You don’t have to know how the cookie crumbles, and you might not ever know why, and that’s okay! After all, you are just a 22-year-old teenage girl.
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