An Ode to Girlhood
Today is my 19th birthday, and the strangest thing about it is the thought that one year from now, I’ll be 20. I can’t tell you how many friends with whom I’ve had a version of this conversation: “Dude… we’re going to be 20.” I know technically, you become an adult at 18, but to tell people that you’re 20? That’s like being a real adult, right? Scary. When I was 17, I was writing a novel where my protagonist was a 17-year-old boy. He arrives at his 18th birthday, and I found myself writing a paragraph that reflected pieces of how I felt as I approached my own 18th birthday:
“The new year came just like any other, but instead of gaining one year, I felt like I was losing seventeen of them. There were all the usual clichés of turning eighteen—Patrick gave me money for a lottery ticket and teased me about going to real prison. But I felt the rest of my life exposed without end; I had liked having the number eighteen as a roof over me.”
And to be honest, that’s exactly how I’m feeling about turning 20 in a year… but maybe worse.
In the later part of my teenage years, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about girlhood: its place in culture, what it means to “lose” it, and why so many young women (including myself) cling to it even after they’ve “grown up.” After I’m officially out of my teenage years, what then? When do I stop being a girl? Is there a point where I’m going to have to leave behind being “girly” for the sake of growing up?
This is what I want to argue: no. And before I get into that, I want to give a couple of disclaimers. Disclaimer #1: I don’t want to stereotype and say that all girls love the same things—pink and sparkles and pop music and rom-coms—because of course, that’s simply not true. This is all just coming from my own experience as a girl who does happen to love all those things. “Girlhood” doesn’t have to be what our culture stereotypically associates with girls. And disclaimer #2: I’m not saying we should hold onto our adolescent behaviors as we grow up. The world would certainly not be a great place if we all behaved like we did when we were thirteen (believe me, no one wants 13-year-old Bailey doing anything out in the world right now). All I’m saying is that maybe there is something about childhood—and particularly, girlhood—which society tries to force out of us too quickly.
Graduating high school on my 18th birthday (not pictured: my favorite wonderfully bedazzled pink shoes)
As a middle-schooler, I had a bit of a “I’m not like other girls” complex (like I said, we don’t want to bring 13-year-old Bailey back). While I didn’t mind some girly things—I only wore pretty colors and was a tad crazy for horses—you would never catch me caring anything about fashion or listening to One Direction, and I took too much pride in that. I wanted to be different. Well, at some point in my mid-teenage years, that all changed. I started to fully embrace being a girl. I painted my nails, I listened to pop music, I wore a pair of sparkly pink sneakers everywhere (and I still do), I had a major crush on young Leonardo DiCaprio, and I became a bit flower-obsessed after writing a whole novel based around a gardener and his flower shop. And I never questioned being “girly”; in my mind, I was just a teenage girl doing teenage girl things.
In the last year or so, I began thinking about what it all meant. If I wore a lot of pink, if I listened to Olivia Rodrigo, if I watched Mean Girls and Clueless until I dropped dead, could I be taken seriously as a student, as a writer, as just a human being in general? Why did I feel an underlying pressure to give up those things or qualify them somehow?
Here’s the thing: our culture tends to write off girls. I’m not talking about women (although that’s a whole other conversation) but girls. Anything “girly” is viewed as silly or less than. To the girl who binge-reads The Hunger Games or blasts Harry Styles in her car, we say “grow up.” Get better taste. Be serious. And of course, there are more important things in the world than the latest album or trend in jeans. But we have no qualms with people being obsessed with March Madness or muscle cars, which are just as silly. We don’t tell the football mega-fans to “grow up.” It’s only the teenage-girl-ish things that we write off as unimportant.
Baby Bailey turning 6 years old
But those teenage-girl-ish things are just as much a part of culture as anything else, which means they provide insight into a very large chunk of our population. Instead of ignoring them or dismissing them as trivial, we can ask what they have to teach us. Why do certain songs or movies or books resonate with so many girls? So while it might not be on the same level of poetry as Shakespeare or Dickinson, when Olivia Rodrigo sings, “I’m not cool and I’m not smart and I can’t even parallel park” and the song “brutal” skyrockets on Spotify, we can ask… why? Maybe because the lyrics of her songs speak honestly to real things that girls feel. Why did the High School Musical franchise become so popular? Maybe because we want to believe that finding our Troy Bolton will be as easy as singing a few songs. Why did Twilight become one of the best-selling books in history? Honestly… couldn’t tell you. But I’m sure there’s some reason in there. My point is that it’s not fair that women are scrutinized for liking things that they liked when they were thirteen. Lots of boys (not all… again, I don’t want to stereotype) start liking sports or cars or certain music from a young age, and it’s culturally acceptable for men to love those things just as much as they age. But heaven forbid a woman with a career and a mortgage listen to One Direction and be taken seriously.
So yes, I am a year older. And no, I will not be sacrificing the “girly” things I love for the sake of growing up. I hope that I am a much more mature person at 29 than I am at 19, but I also hope that in ten years, I still will sing my heart out to “Shake It Off” and will curl up on the couch to watch 10 Things I Hate About You when I’m having a bad day. I hope to have a family, a career, to write a best-seller or two. But more importantly, I hope I never start taking myself too seriously. Life is too short to leave girlhood behind.