January’s full moon in Leo is urging us to lean in to self-love and tell our inner Censors to stfu. Loving ourselves in a deep, unconditional, sometimes cringey way is essential to healing the wounds of olde. How would your inner teenager want to be loved today?
Ritual practice for giving in to the cringe: open your window, give miss moona a finger gun, and tell her exactly how you intend to love on yourself for the next month. And then buckle in for some weird dreams and unsettling bouts of deja vu. Capturette, rememberette!
Hi darling dears! I hope your 2024 has been off to an invigorating and/or restful start, whichever beginning you feel you most need at the moment. Mine has been overtaken by doodling fuzzy critters on everything, everywhere, all the time. It’s a delightful little habit that I plan to indulge for the rest of forever, especially bc it keeps bringing me new, cute Lil Guys™ from the depths of my brain (think soot sprites with feet and extensions). I’m calling them thinklings and you’ll be hearing more from them soon.
Barbie’s back in the news for awards season — hopefully the #Kenough memes aren’t, even if Hillary Rodham Clinton is using her god-given talent of never knowing when not to post to drag them out of the depths of internet hell kicking and screaming to be sat “just chillin’!” next to some bizarre Frankenstein hashtag in Cedar Rapids because feminism means the bombs should be pink! Sorry I got lost in that one. I don’t want to see her tweets anymore. I can’t. Do this. Again.
Anyway, Miss Mattel’s return to the news cycle reminded me about the Barbie-related essay I wrote this summer that never saw the light of screen for various procrastinational and artistical blockage reasons that will remain vague. So here are some thoughts on the contemplative-girlhood-to-raging-inner-teenager pipeline. Bon voyage!
Every sentient being in 2008’s America was subjected to one of the most brutal radio overplay assaults ever committed against a singular song, and if you still have any taste left after three rounds in the ring with COVID, you still like it. “Use Somebody” should’ve been covered by Ashlee Simpson on the “Barbie” soundtrack if they really wanted to get to the heart of that angry teenager character who was right about America actually and shouldn’t have learned anything from the thinly-veiled Chevy ad car chase scene.
The girl teen experience 🤝 Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody”
Seemingly endless repetition of begging for what you need (via screaming) while people around you feel annoyed about it.
Blast this shit in a secondhand ‘06 Pathfinder and try to tell me you can’t smell Natural Lite-encrusted beer pong cups and an unsupervised bonfire. And don’t say growing up as a teen in Alabama isn’t a universal experience! We had area code-specific ‘gossip girl’ accounts ruining lives and relationships on Twitter dot com just like you!
The Barbie movie itself said more about Ken’s concept of patriarchy and Michael Cera’s innate star quality than the lived experience of young girls, but it did usher in a cultural moment focused on girlhood and what the reclamation of that idea could mean in 2023. In the same summer, Taylor Swift put on the biggest tour *ever*, where hundreds of thousands of people gathered to scream-sing songs about girl feelings for three hours straight over and over and over again. Men with podcasts and personality disorders talked down to Women at large while accidentally dressed like Ken. Barbenheimer memes laid waste to predictive social media marketers across the nation. There was… a lot of pink.
But one of the most salient moments of the whole saga came from Billie Eilish’s whispering, ethereal, heartbreaking ballad, “What Was I Made For.” The sweeping chords of Billie’s tour de restraint conjure memories of aching and longing and yearning to love and be loved and simultaneously, in contrast, searching for something bigger than romantic love to sustain you and give your life a larger meaning. What was I made for? Because this teen boy in an unwashed hoodie who goes dead-eyed and excruciatingly serious every time he leans in for a kiss can’t be it.
Takin' a drive, I was an ideal
Looked so alive, turns out I'm not real
Just something you paid for
What was I made for?
The foundational ideas of Feminism 101 (see: Gloria’s big speech before the Kensurrection) are now easily accessed by a large population in mass media format because most women today can immediately relate to the uncomfortable recognition of repetitive dismissal and the process of slow but steady object-i-fi-ca-tion — feeling yourself shift and shatter into disparate ideas of what the Thing that is Woman is allowed and expected to be by the people around you. And many of those experiences come thundering in like a mustang stampede right around high school age. Patriarchy horse Ken reference intended.
'Cause I, I
I don't know how to feel
But I wanna try
I don't know how to feel
But someday, I might
Someday, I might
Somewhere between girlhood and womanhood lies the blurry abyss of the emotional experience of teenagerdom. Everyone around you is morphing just as quickly and dramatically as you are, taking on strange shapes and colors one minute, and hacking off entire limbs of their personalities the next.
The acidic sensation of pieces of us being carved away as the boys we grew up with notice that we are women, and they are men, and begin to treat us accordingly. The gulf of separation that widens while we’re stuck in the bathroom, piling on pounds of new beauty to-dos so that we can be desired, too. A deep and profound sadness at all the innocences we didn’t know we had to lose.
When did it end? All the enjoyment
I'm sad again, don't tell my boyfriend
It's not what he's made for
What was I made for?
The summer of girlhood brought us buckets of bows, glittering concert ‘fits, and questionable math techniques. But the real value of connecting to younger versions of ourselves isn’t found in updating early aughts aesthetics or rebranding intensely anti-aging beauty regimens as self care. These younger iterations of us are still hurting because they need to be heard. The best thing we can do, for all of us, is listen.
I was never able to connect to my inner child until I imagined her as a person outside of me, standing just ahead of me, going about her business. She’s wearing a red tartan dress over a white turtleneck with patent leather Mary Janes and frilly socks (#just90skidsthings). She wears her hair down because the bangs and headband keep her face clear enough for adventuring. She is squatting at the side of a woodland path, intently watching something small wriggling around on the ground. Her eyes are trained on whatever creature she’s most recently cornered in the grass, taking in all its movements and wondering a million questions in her busy little mind. I love her so much it hurts my insides to consider.
Observing her and giving her a detailed shape helped me remember some parts of myself that I particularly adore: an endless curiosity for the world around me, and an undying fascination with mother nature. Little me and I have spent a lot of time together since I remembered how to find her. We’ve talked about many things, like the big scary ride at the waterpark that we DON’T want to go on, and how very very sad we are that our kitten ‘ran away’ (yes we are letting her believe it ran away!!). I tell her I’m scared and sad too and that we can be scared and sad together for as long as we feel. Little me and now-me go for lots of walks in the forest by the lake these days. She knows she has me, and we both feel safer for it.
So I’ve made peace with little elementary school me, we are in tune and aligned and I am able to clearly hear what she needs from me when she needs it. But one evening recently, when we were returning to our big, old, cozy house in the woods as the sunset filtered through golden leaves, we heard something. A thudding beat of frustration that seemed to be booming from the upstairs corner bedroom. A door slammed. The click of a bedroom lock sliding into place clattered over the sound of the angry music seeping through the windows. A moment of recognition; she’s here. The dreaded, the feared, the terrifying: My Inner Teenager.
“Shit.”
Oh man is she PISSED, too. Rage emanates off her every movement, and her words slice through your defenses like all those hours she stays awake deep into the night are spent sharpening them to a murderous degree. She’s mad at the world and the adults running it and the idiot IDIOT boys who seem to have a much easier time moving through it. Nobody else really knows what to make of her; the only thing scarier to her parents than when she’s yelling is when she’s crying. And she seems to be doing quite a lot of both.
But I know her, too, and I remember that she sometimes has a hard time knowing what she needs, much less expressing it. This night, as I enter the house that’s buckling beneath the weight of teenage me’s emotions, I make my own mental space for whatever it is she needs to offload right now. I knock at her door and ask to talk. I wait a few seconds after the mad mood music cuts off and the lock clicks open before walking in (space, autonomy, self-determination, etc.). I sit on the end of her bed and tell her what I think she needs to hear: you’re so right, they absolutely do NOT understand you, and also they still love you anyway. I remember how you feel, and you have every right to feel it. I want to hear whatever you have to say. And then I let her say it.
What she says still comes out a little murky; I can’t hear her quite as clearly as our younger one, yet. But she also can’t convey her meaning as easily as she used to. The ideas she’s attempting to purvey have grown increasingly complex and entangled. It’s like the clarity in her head gets spun through a shredder on the way out of her mouth. I know the feeling.
Think I forgot how to be happy
Something I'm not, but something I can be
Something I wait for
Something I'm made for
Something I'm made for
We haven’t solved it all, but we have agreed to work at it together. I hug her and tell her I love her always and forever, and that Taylor Swift’s “Forever and Always” was very literally made for times like these. I set some ice water with a slice of lemon by her bed and close the door on the way out. According to me, it helps.
When I was about 15, I was being a smartass about something to my dad, and he called me a “wench”. He called me a wench because he wanted to call me a bitch but held back. I responded, “nice 18th century comeback, old man” and left him jaw agape and mind aghast in the kitchen. I was definitely just being a bitch. I still want her on my team.
I hope you and your inner teenager stay up late this weekend talking about piercings and how to trick teen boys into better hygiene practices.
Bye Barbie! See you on the other side of the moon,
Addi