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On the enduring fantasy of being “just a girl” — and how I finally decided to get a grip and grow up.
A year ago, I was sitting in my aunt’s garden in Connecticut, bawling my eyes out. It’s normal, I think, to emotionally regress somewhat when visiting family.
But I wasn’t prepared for how vulnerable and immature and unstable I’d feel on this trip in a way I hadn’t since I was a teenager. For one thing, it was Mother’s Day, and I’ve been estranged from mine for more than a decade. I’d also just been abruptly laid off from the journalism job that was supposed to turn everything around for me for the better.
By then, I’d been living in the U.K. for a couple of years with my wife and our dog — thrilled to be together after endless months of long distance, less thrilled with my employment prospects. Newly jobless yet again and unsure of what else to do with myself, I made a spur-of-the-moment trip back home. Or, at least, close enough to it.
When my mom kicked me out at 18, her sister who lived five minutes down the road took me in. I spent my summers home from college with my aunt and my uncle and my two cousins. They are wonderful, hilarious, special people who have all helped me and my four younger siblings immensely over the years in every conceivable way. I am so grateful to them.
But that weekend, I wasn’t thinking about everything I have — the love and support of my friends, my partner, and many members of my otherwise very messed-up family — but everything I didn’t. Scrolling through other people’s Instagram posts about their perfect, beautiful mothers, I felt the lack like a giant gaping hole inside of me: I don’t have a mom. I do have a dad, whom I love, but he’s never been someone I could really rely on.
I do not have parents the way parents are supposed to be parents. And now that I was seeing so many friends and colleagues and acquaintances having children of their own, buying houses, and building futures, I felt deeply resentful — bitter to my core — that I hadn’t grown up with the kind of unconditional love that makes for an emotionally healthy and well-adjusted adult; neither did I have generational wealth to fall back on.
I was broke and in debt and sad as hell and less confident in my own abilities and self-worth than I’d ever been.
I was also, I know now, hard-core PMSing and smoking entirely So when my aunt came out to the garden to ask me what was wrong and I tried explaining to her how I felt like I was spiraling out of control, that I was letting my wife down, that creative people who care about making the world a better place are struggling to simply survive these days, and that my deepest, darkest fear, at this point in my life, was that I was more likely to end up on the streets than I was to get anywhere close to my aunt’s standard of living, I ended up screaming and sobbing while my poor, dear aunt stared on, silent and stone-faced.
I can only imagine that she thought it was absurd for me to imply I could conceivably become homeless before she or any of my other family members or friends would step in to help me; my wife literally owns our home back in Northern England. As jealous as I was — am — of peers with more robust safety nets, I’m still enormously privileged by almost all measures in this life.
But I didn’t want to feel like an adult that day, one capable of taking a reasonable perspective and dealing with her big-girl problems. I didn’t want to consider what might actually be in my power to change about my circumstances. I didn’t want to pick up a clipboard and start canvassing against data centers and media-killing technocapitalists and generative AI. I simply wanted to be babied.
Lately, it seems that many women — perhaps especially white millennial ones — are indulging in the same fantasy. According to endless social-media posts and group-chat messages,It’s as if a generation raised on the dream of the girl boss has become disillusioned by the promise that hard work will get us anywhere . Struggle is for chumps!
“I’m just a girl,” and I don’t want to learn about balancing my checkbook or filing expense reports or how to parallel park. , more phenomenon than movie, and Taylor Swift’s mind-bogglingly profitable Eras Tour had women spending collective billions to proudly and unapologetically relive their sparkly, pink-tulled girlhoods. Fashion has trended toward the young and feminine, too:, “The market conspired to sell us one thing, rendered every which way, and that thing was: girl.
” Ours is a time in which “the only way to have fun by turning away from adult womanhood wholesale and toward a breezy, bright alternative. Instead of politics, can I interest you in some blissful, childlike ignorance? ” I deeply understand the appeal of blissful, childlike ignorance, of neglecting all of one’s responsibilities and the entire general concept of the Future. I really do.
But of course that all comes at a cost — particularly for women. Why should we aspire to be “just girls” when it’s men who want us to stay preadolescent as sexual objects under their control? Women infantilize ourselves at our own peril.
One of the most interesting questions about growing up is how independent we’re really supposed to be, and how much it’s even possible to be solo agents of our own destinies when, as members of friend groups, families, and society at large, we depend on other people every day. But ideally, we find some middle ground between trying to go it all alone and being completely, hopelessly reliant on others.
The “I’m just a girl” trend encourages the latter: women actively ceding the floor to their boyfriends or husbands or some other adult in the room. And that might mean a reprieve from some burdensome responsibilities, sure, but it also means being less free. I wasn’t ready to snap myself out of arrested development last spring. Nor was I earlier this year while watching the first few episodes of season ten of, about her daily weed habit.
At the time, I sympathized with Amanda as a fellow chill stoner girl; we’re both in our 30s and childless, we have both dealt with depression, and we’re both trying to figure out what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives. For years, Amanda had worked as a creative director for Kyle’s dream, the alcoholic-seltzer company Loverboy, which, by last summer, had rendered Kyle millions in debt.
I’d always thought Kyle’s domineering personality meant that he steamrolled Amanda into submission, poking holes in her self-confidence so that she’d remain forever in service of his vision instead of ever striking out on her own. At one point this season, he mutters under his breath, “I don’t think she wants a single thing to do with me, and she’s too scared to get out of it because she can’t do a single thing herself. ” Mega harsh.
But, in retrospect, there’s probably a kernel of truth there — at least based on what unflattering edits we’ve seen on TV. How much has Amanda ceded control of her life to her fun-loving but short-tempered and occasionally quite cruel husband, letting herself be buffeted along by the tides of his wants, his needs?
Early in the season, when faced with questions in interview confessionals about the dire state of Kyle’s finances — which, since they’re married, means they’re Amanda’s finances — Amanda brushes it off in a baby voice: “I do art, okay? ” All that money and business stuff, that’s up to Kyle. Letting yourself slip into Adult Babyhood doesn’t only mean holding yourself back; it affects other people, too.
Amanda embarking on her “” and dating like she was back in high school led her to hooking up with her now ex–best friend Ciara Miller’s ex-boyfriend, West Wilson — a profound betrayal to someone who’d been one of her most ardent champions. And given the racial dynamic at play, Amanda’s selfishness comes across as even more egregious.
Her chilly aloofness in the face of everything from her marriage to her money to her friendships is summed up perfectly in one of the most delicious reads in Bravo history. Ciara, at the end of the first episode of the season’s reunion, says that maybe West and Amanda will make it as a couple after all: “The best woman for West is someone who’s not gonna check him on anything, and that’s totally Amanda.
She’s very mute, she’s gonna be that weak figure that he needs, and he can always be the star in the relationship. I actually think maybe it could work. ” It’s the first time the whole episode Amanda sheds a tear — perhaps because she knows Ciara is exactly right.
“You can’t help who you like,” Amanda insists multiple times in the three-part reunion, acting like she had no agency or choice in the matter. In the final episode, she says she only realized she had feelings for West after he made the first move: “He sort of said something and, was like, ‘Am I crazy? Like, is there something here? ’ And I feel like all the emotions just kind of came flooding in.
” She spends most of the hour staring on coldly as her former and current man talkher. But the only person who can make her believe that she’s enough on her own, and that she deserves better — and that other women, like Ciara, deserve better too — is herself. , or watching it for the first time.
They’re waxing poetic on TikTok about “millennial optimism,” wishing they, too, had been young adults in Bushwick during the Obama years, blogging on Jezebel and dancing to Robyn at warehouse parties — instead of going through their teens and 20s in the aftermath of a pandemic and the rise of Trump, socially isolated and addicted to their phones.characters were , things weren’t always easy-breezy for them, either. The pilot episode features writer-creator Lena Dunham as Hannah Horvath getting cut off financially from her parents, forcing her into a world of adult responsibility she didn’t feel ready for and definitely didn’t want.
Except perhaps for Shoshanna, who gets so tired of everyone else’s immaturity and narcissism by the series’ end she simply stops being their friend, the women ofspend their 20s refusing in various ways to grow up. They’re also forced to learn the painful lesson that plenty of other adults, like their parents, will refuse to grow up, too.
There’s the oft-TikToked scene with Jessa and her deadbeat dad on a swing set, where her father asks her accusatorially: “What, you think I can rely on you? ” “I shouldn’t have to! ” Jessa cries.
“I’m the child! ” The endless complications of the parent and adult-child relationship is one of the more interesting topics raised in Lena Dunham’s best-selling memoir,, about the disorienting, exhilarating, and often traumatizing experience of writing, starring in, and eventually directing an era-defining show when she was in her early to mid-20s.
Dunham’s book — with its two sections titled “I’m Not a Girl / “Not Yet a Woman” — is perhaps one of the most convincing cultural texts yet about the downsides of falling prey to the “I’m just a girl” defense when it comes to our shortcomings as adult women: the ways in which self-infantilization can bleed into misogyny. Dunham, now pushing 40, once wanted the world to see her as “just a girl” when she doesn’t want to take responsibility for her own actions — like all the times she made stupid gaffes of varying levels of seriousness in public, which she once called the fault of her “delusional girl persona.
” And she wanted to be seen as ain particular, like when she was being fetishized as such, or when she was giving people her time and money who didn’t necessarily deserve it.
A nasty series of emails from the producer Scott Rudin, after Dunham decided to back out on a project, captured the culture at large’s paradoxical relationship with her at the time: “Mr Rudin had gone from flattery and flowers and Alexander Wang handbags and celebrating my youthful naivete and enthusiasm to telling me what I really was: a spoiled little girl who didn’t even know how to live without her parents getting her dressed in the morning, a phony who would be cast out of the business just as quickly as I had been allowed in.
” Dunham’s parents might not have been dressing her, but they did have big roles to play in her career at practically every stage, from her mother soliciting donations from their richer and more famous friends to fund Dunham’s first feature film,set more than once on Lena’s behalf to let them know she wouldn’t be coming in; her health would not allow it. Before she was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, mysterious health incidents frequently landed her in the hospital.
Dunham’s onset mentor and BFF, Jenni Konner, 15 years Dunham’s senior, would lie in bed with her for hours one day, then encourage her to push through her chronic pain to make it to set the next. If there’s a villain in this book, it’s Konner. Dunham worships her and their producer Judd Apatow — “adults with children,” she calls them at one point, while she was “a child … with a literal stuffed toy jammed in my suitcase.
” At one point, when Dunham is struggling with disordered eating, she writes that Konner hisses at her, “It’s not that hard. Just put food in your mouth. ” To Dunham, “This didn’t sound like concern … It sounded like a threat. ” For the rest of the day, Konner ignored her, Dunham’s eyes filling with tears whenever she tried speaking.
Konner only returned her gaze after Dunham ate two giant pieces of pizza.
“Good girl,” Dunham recalls Konner saying.when, inside a massive steel pipe in an electrical plant in Dumbo, a “fuckboy Pablo Escobar impersonator who was apparently my sexual kryptonite,” as Dunham calls the character’s real-life inspiration, forces Dunham’s character to choke on his penis. “Good girl,” he says. In both situations, with Konner and the dirtbag fuckboy, Dunham is being taken advantage of. But there is also, it seems, a part of her that wants to be.
She wasn’t necessarily interested in keeping her relationship with Konner to a strictly professional one, supervisor and mentee; she desired that almost mother-daughter-like bond . Shetells her she’s the strongest person he knows and she wonders why he can’t just let her be weak. Her parents clearly cared for her through her illnesses much more consistently than he did; it was one of the things that led to the demise of their relationship.
The downsides to claiming girlhood the older we get only multiply with time — because people won’t take you seriously as a grown-up, a boss, an artist. And sure, maybe they wouldn’t take you seriously regardless. But why give them any more ammo?
, Hannah Horvath is forced to grow up when she has a baby but Dunham herself doesn’t enjoy such a tidy narrative. By her mid-30s, “I had thought I’d be married with a husband … pushing my daughter in a stroller on the streets of Brooklyn, exasperated with her barrettes and my endless schedule.
I had thought all of my mess would be behind me, and that secret nights in places I didn’t want to be caught would be ancient stories in a funnier book than this one. ” I used to think I’d have found meaning and purpose by having children around this point in my life, too.
Kids aren’t a first-class ticket to adulthood, obviously — there are millions of immature parents out there; just look at mine — but the reality is that for so many generations, women were expected to go from being a literal child to having a child. And now plenty of millennials and Gen-Zers are having kids later and later, or not at all. Many of us simply don’t think we can afford it.
Plus, being a mother doesn’t necessarily sound all that appealing when “having it all” for the modern woman often means having all the parental, household, and financial responsibilities with barely any structural, systemic or family support. I got a new job at home in the U.K., starting over in the much more stable field of health care; I recently passed my certification to become a phlebotomist. I’m still pursuing my passions , but I’m also, blessedly, earning a steady paycheck, and taking pride in doing something useful.
And by caring for myself more than I ever have, I’m able to be a better partner, a better family member, a better friend. I like being an adult. I love it, actually. As a kid, I’d hated not being able to make my own choices.
Now I’m a grown woman,But like every other human being, no matter how old, I still need help sometimes. A couple’s therapist, if you were to ask them about how much we should all be receiving and giving care from one another, might tell you about the spectrum between independent, codependent, and interdependent.
The goal of a healthy relationship is interdependence: the balance between mutual support and individual autonomy.finale, when we learn that the iconic comedian Deborah Vance , fresh off a record-setting hour in Central Park, has been diagnosed with cancer. Deborah, as she tells her mentee and protégé, Ava , has always been one to do things her own way, on her own terms, so she’d decided to travel to Switzerland for voluntary euthanasia.
Ava struggles to accept her choice, even after she agrees to accompany Deborah on a trip to Paris ahead of her last and final stop in Switzerland.
“Not everything is about you! ” Ava yells at Deborah when she makes one last-ditch attempt to convince her to try treatment.
“You should be thinking about other people right now! ” But of course, if anything is ever really about just one person and one person alone, it’s death — that’s something we all have to do solo. Ava, throughout the five-season series, has been an immature, insecure mess; it’s with the support of Deborah, her agent, and her friends that we see her by this final episode showrunning her own series. But she still struggles to fully face her independence.
“Don’t leave me,” she whimpers. But Deborah is able to convince her she’ll be just fine without her.
“You’ll be okay,” she tells her. “You’re a big, brave girl. ” It’s only when Ava has decided to respect Deborah’s choice and her own autonomy over her life — and death — that Deborah realizes she still has more to do and to give. She decides to try treatment after all, sacrificing her vanity when it comes to others seeing her becoming weaker and more fragile so that she can do one last hour of stand-up with her friend.
Codependent Baby Woman Ava and Fiercely Independent Ice Queen Deborah have reached something like interdependence. May we all. You'll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. New York
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