The 21-Year-Old Teenage Girl
brain development doesn’t stop until you’re 25, right?
Have you seen the ‘21-year-old teenage girl’ jokes going around? If you haven’t then maybe I’m just receiving very targeted social media posts which I think say a little too much about me.
The general concept is easy to grasp. The 21-year-old teenage girl is adrift. She’s not the girlboss businesswoman or the cultured creative. She’s kind of just hanging out and experiencing the same levels of emotional turmoil that she has for the last few years, even though she thought that things would have sorted themselves out by now and she wouldn’t be worrying about the same old things. If she’s me, she’s wondering when her skin is ever going to properly clear up because it doesn’t seem fair that she’s still getting breakouts when she’s an adult now with a real job and this isn’t helping her professional image.
It’s generally accepted that the idea of ‘growing up’ is a myth, and that people don’t often feel that their numerical age correlates with how they feel. Older people often become frustrated with the fact that their bodies don’t line up with their minds, their joints seeming to have missed the memo that they’re mentally still in their thirties.
I think that feeling starts to kick in once you reach your twenties. Going from child to teenager is a slow-moving process that just sort of happens, changes in your life occurring gradually until you realise that you don’t need to use kids’ cutlery anymore. Still new to the world, everything is still to be discovered and explored. Once you hit 21, you’ve already been told countless times that that world of possibility is a lie and you’ll never be happy. Maybe not directly, but always being told to make the most of your adolescent years and to savour not yet being in the drudgery of a 9-to-5 doesn’t leave you all that optimistic for adulthood.
Often only recently out of full-time education, your early 20s can feel like you’re only pretending to be a fully-fledged ‘grown up’. A majority of the age group who left for university have moved back home, and are trying to convene the lives and habits they’ve accrued living independently with the setting of their childhood home. The dissonance between these things — a corporate job and the posters you’ve had on your wall since you were 13 — make it hard to feel that you’ve grown up at all.
There’s likely a correlation between this ‘21-year-old teenager’ idea and the fact that people who are now in their early twenties lost the end of their teenage years to Covid. Obviously life didn’t stop, but the time between 18 and 21 has, for many, blurred into a general idea of malaise, stress and discomfort. Even if you managed to have a great time, it wouldn’t have been what you’d envisaged. Personally, after a pandemic and other personal issues that heightened the isolation factor of it all, I feel like I missed out on a good few chapters of the ‘being an adult’ manual.
I think the ‘girl’ component is important, too. There’s a lot of cultural weight placed on being a teenage girl, a lot of spoken and unspoken expectations that are built up from a very young age. I’ve previously written about the unachievable goal of teenage life, and although I can only offer one perspective I think it’s harder for girls as they grow up. There’s pressure to be older than you are, to look like the 25-year-olds playing tweens on TV, to be mature and responsible (in a way that’s easy to exploit).
A considerable amount of media is about being a sad teenage girl, or reflecting on what it was like to be a teenage girl, or discussing the general sense of pain and suffering that comes with being, you guessed it, a teenage girl. There’s no doubt that it’s not necessarily the most fun few years, but it’s nevertheless an image that women are supposed to aspire to pretty much forever. Told for evermore to hide wrinkles, minimise any signs of ageing, keep yourself youthful in body and mind.
If you felt like you fell short of the mark between the ages of 13 and 19, not getting the sense of fulfilment and the teenage experience that you wanted, then it can be hard to move on and give up on chasing that unachievable goal — especially when you’re constantly being told that you’re old and passed it and there’s little more to look forward to. Ergo, the 21-year-old teenage girl; unable to let go of the ideals that have plagued her for so long, and unsure what the blueprints are for the future.
Is this too bleak? I feel like it’s too bleak. It’s a funny Twitter joke that I’m projecting onto to work through the discomfort I feel about ageing and responsibility. Maybe I’ve just seen too many skincare adverts about my depleting collagen levels. But if a literature degree taught me anything, it’s that there’s a deeper meaning behind anything if you stare at it hard enough.
Whether I will ever evolve beyond being a teenage girl is impossible to predict. Maybe one day I will stop feeling like I’m walking around in a far-too-big suit marking me out as a fake adult, wondering how I got here.