edited by my best friend and the coolest adult girl I know, Caitlin Papadopoulos
It’s springtime in Vancouver. Most days it is raining, but we have been blessed with blazing heat a few times over the past month. I like when things are aligned; I like to eat specific foods when I’m ovulating and others when I’m menstruating. I like it when, during the spring, sleepy ideas within me begin to wake. Just like the sun, they come and go, not fully hatched, not quite ready to crawl out of the egg. I’ve been feeling a lot like this lately, seeing into morsels of what I might become this summer. It’s exciting, but still - it’s sleepy. Reflecting on this reminds me of the astounding opportunity I have as a woman in 2024 in this city. There are endless ways to cater to myself and to my community, and it makes me feel very much like a child yet very much like an adult. Nothing articulates this quite like the phenomenon of Adult Girls.
On January 15th of this year I posted a slide on Instagram and captioned it:
Being a woman is lemony fresh and as harsh as a martini. It is January again and I know that last year is the last year in which I will have infantilized myself. Just a girl! We all chant with smiles on our lips, but what we really mean is will you do this for me? Will you do this for me in the cold while I stay warm?
The pictures were personally revelatory in a way that only my closest allies could make sense of. I imagined myself then as the very best version: independent and comfortable enough to allow for the reception of servitude. Even more, an ability to acknowledge it; to say no, I am not small, but please take care of me anyway, in the ways that you can. The caption is true for me still, but I wasn’t aware of how deeply I was lying to myself, how deeply I was letting the reins of my life slip between my almond-shaped claws. Let me return to my fallacy shortly.
This period of relinquishing myself to girlhood began nearly a full year prior: February 2023, I was fresh out of an on-again-off-again relationship, and I was simply exhausted. I didn’t know how, at this point, to heal. I was using my ego. I was using my inner drill sergeant. But ultimately, I was tired. I was working at a small family-run restaurant in Kitsilano a few blocks from my house. There, I would identify certain tasks as “blue” and others as “pink,” enforcing them with a juvenile plea. I didn’t want to take out the garbage, move a heavy beer keg, or stack chairs on tables while holding all of this accumulated trauma. Frankly, everyone seemed to agree without complaint. I was a girl with a broken heart - a boy was mean to me! And why couldn’t I, for once in my thirty years of life, take that seriously? I’d never really allowed myself to indulge like that before. Either I internalized it or defended against it with hyper-independence. So I acquiesced. I offered my deepest genuine female support; I talked to Ryan about his ex-wife, I talked to Antoine about his immigration, I went to the beach to hand out fliers and promote the business, I held Flex’s hand while he cried boasting of his children, I came early and stayed late, I served (most) of the bold groups of men, I gave wholeheartedly and I took without an ounce of guilt, I smiled and giggled and danced and floated around the bar claiming, “I’m just a girl!” while my co-worker Jake picked up the slack in other ways. I joked with my colleagues wearing a huge giggly smile. In some ways, I played the perfect part under the given circumstances. And you know what? I had a lot of fun that spring and summer. It was freeing. I felt like a child with tons of people around me for protection. People that were my friends. I didn’t worry about getting too drunk one night and crying in the hallway; Ryan and Antoine helped me close up before walking me home, telling me it would get better soon. What I feel when I recall these images now is self-protection. Because despite this or in spite of that or even when I felt the safest in any relationship I’ve ever had - with a parent, a boss, a boyfriend - I have always left myself susceptible to an imbalance of power which inevitably led to abuse. And I was an unconscious, complicit, willing, and enabling party.
“I’m just a girl” has risen in popularity online as well as colloquially; it is both memeable as well as a viable and relatable slogan for women across multiple generations. As with any cultural sensation, it is exceptionally difficult to find a single birthplace. Instead, multiple gene lines cross, certainly related but seemingly disconnected, which makes me wonder why trends like this are not predicted in advance. Many people will make the argument that this hails from ancient demoralizing patriarchal control with a modern twist - capitalism and misogyny have yet again joined forces to tame women into sweet, baking *girlbosses* who sell Sephora and Botox on TikTok, who can’t do math and therefore need a man who is familiar with “the economy” (what the hell is that). I just can’t help but follow something in my gut that says: I disagree, and I am, after all, just a girl; I listen to my instincts!
This phenomenon of self-referential girlhood is pure untapped capital and it’s working in a symbiotic relationship. For example, 2023 was named “the year of the ribbon” in a Harper’s Bazaar article titled “I’m Just a Girl Who Loves Bows But What Does That Even Mean?” Tara Gonzalez, the article’s author, details the way bows have been showcased in high fashion (re: Miu Miu, Sandy Liang) while also being used as a marketing tool for wildly contrasting products: Jollibee US posted a picture to their Instagram with a pink bow neatly tied over a chicken sandwich captioned “This is me if you even care.” It’s not just corporations that are girlifying their products; content and meme creators are putting ribbons on pickles and deers with embellished and specific captions that somehow still resonate (the pickle for me, personally). At the risk of Venn-diagram-ing myself into the topic of memes, these homemade images have become a massive avenue of communication for young people. It creates an instant feeling of camaraderie, of being seen, of seeing someone else; it is humbling and funny and accessible, and I’m just going to come right out and say it: it’s anti-pick-me (more on this later). This symbiotic dynamic is evocative of Miranda Priestly’s infamous line: that sweater is not just blue… it’s actually cerulean. But what came first, and does it matter? Would that change our opinion on whether or not this was thrust upon us or whether industry is adapting to our desires? Look at the picture of this mermaid, for instance, reading a book in a bathtub surrounded by glass bottles and flowers and two cats. Digital perfection. But who is she? How old is she? Does she work? Is she single? What the hell is she reading? It doesn’t fucking matter. She is just a girl. We created that, and then we recreate it in our personal lives so that fact and fiction merge and no longer explicitly matter. Art/life imitation? Culturally, it’s just a vibe. I mean, for god’s sake, there are slippers on the ground. She’s a mermaid! It’s ridiculous. I can’t wait to comment “slay,” post it to my story, and add: this is so me, DM the artist to tell her she’s a genius and ask, does she accept commissions? None of this means I can’t also vote, read Kafka etc. etc.
The fruits of creating, and engaging with, this artwork are abundant and generative. By placing the girl at the center of an image that she can physically see, her hopes and dreams become solidified and validated outside of both capitalism as well as the realm of her imagination: it now makes up part of her persona, her online avatar. She is the muse. Identifying with an image, or creating an image in your likelihood, provides proximity to a euphoric fairytale that then translates into the way girls carry themselves offline. I relate this to taking a baby step towards freedom. The images also provide a string of continuity for women in a market economy that thrives off of their competition.
My favourite poet, Megan Fernandez, posted an article to her Instagram story called “The Case for Marrying an Older Man: A woman’s life is all work and little rest. An age gap relationship can help.” Over the screenshot of the article’s title, Fernandez wrote (in part):
Women deserve a better discourse about why they’re exhausted. It’s called the wage gap and childcare options and health insurance and more evolved masculinities if you’re into masculinities. It’s called resisting the romance myth and the constant socialization of your role as only being to martyr yourself… Want less work and more play? Get a community of people who love play… I want more articles of women abandoning their families and following owls for sport, more author bios of “she lives in nyc with her 12 lovers and a cat named Saturn,” more weird paths, more license to fail, less suffering, my god. And just better ideas. Better writing. Last thing! There’s a subtle difference between self-infantilization and a sub-kink and I don’t think this person has the capacity to understand either, let alone what their juxtaposition might mean.
That last part has stuck with me. Is a sub-kink born out of infantilization and self-infantilization? Is this not textbook Stockholm syndrome? The subtle difference, in my understanding, is that one of those things lacks agency. What do we do with our collective trauma? What do we do with our healing? Must we, as women (or any marginalized group, for that matter,) always be taking things back, rebranding them? We have no choice, and this is to say: we do. It’s an inescapable cause and effect. I won’t get into kinks here; I’m just a girl. But let your mind juxtapose those, explore it, and try not to lie to yourself.
Fernandez’s response is far more generative (and pertinent to this essay) than the article itself. The author, Grazie Sophia Christie, now 27 years old, Harvard and Oxford educated, with plenty of classic fictional references, details the labor involved with dating a man of your own age and offers her own intentional romance (he was 20, and she was 30) as an alternative:
Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.
Which is actually kind of fun for her, if she hadn’t written an essay about it. I am of the belief that there is a massive risk in acting to avoid something out of fear and consequently bringing that thing into being. Near the beginning, she writes: “at 20 I had felt daunted by the idea of becoming my ideal self.” Part of me wants to scream, “Ya babe, same!” But I think of myself now, capable of enjoying the life I am currently living while also striving for loftier and quirkier goals for myself. Instead, I won’t scream; I’ll just imagine a super pixelated jpeg of a fairy kneeling delicately in a forest with an italic print overlay that says “Daunted by the idea of becoming my ideal self. Doing it for the plot.” Or maybe I’ll just lace those words over a back camera selfie with a tired pout. I’m just a girl, I don’t know how to make memes! Doesn’t that neatly identify the paradox of “just a girl” culture? A culture imbued with thousands of images created by girls?
There are many stand-alone sentences which I can support in Christie’s essay; for instance, she talks about having to teach men how to behave only to have that behaviour lived out for the woman who comes later, or taking on unnecessary emotional and physical labor at the expense of your own growth. Sure, yes, we’re just girls. We must maintain boundaries. But ultimately, and with a bit of sadness, I am disappointed but not in any way shocked by her narrative. I am 33 with no children, no husband, and I am decidedly no longer raising boys to be men. Yet, I still dance when my favourite song comes on, grocery shopping is always an adventure, and (as of today) I have never lost a seat to a woman because she was 20 and I am ten years her senior, or as Christie explains: “A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her.” I wonder, who forgot to teach this girl that a woman who “earns her welcome” is a valuable way to build self-worth? Ironically though, I don’t have to “earn” my welcome; certainly, I am well aware that my welcome, at times, may solely be based on my appearance. But I don’t go places simply because I am invited and, most often, they have to earn my welcome (as a matter of fact!) And also, what year is this? I find another article she has written about being jealous of her friends, of being told by boys that she is plain where his real crush is beautiful, captivating, a writer, but Christie can be a better one because her perspective is, how did she put it, a “little closer to the truth.” I now begin to paint a fuller picture. An emphasis on beauty, or perhaps, a lack thereof. A deep resentment and belief that “to be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged” and the feeling of her life flashing before her, that kernel of jealousy in her stomach as threatening as the idea of being discarded. I wonder, has the pick-me transcended the bounds of singledom into a way of life (duh)? It makes sense to me that she chose to “get ahead of the problem” and that she has found fulfillment and love in her life and marriage. She talks about the women, at 30, who were unimpressed with her future husband’s choice in a 20-year-old girl, writing, “these were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down?” Ah, so it’s time then, that has confounded her. In believing herself to be evading the problem of patriarchy, she has actively subscribed to another societal (and even older than that) determinant. By marrying him, she was simply marrying him, not pushing those other women down, and I do not know their dynamic so I have no opinion on their union. However, by making this argument she is upholding the narrative she allegedly tried to avoid; offering no advice on how to change it and instead, simply a loophole to find ease within it, surfing the “trouble of being a woman” and not surfing the joy of being a woman. Self-infantilization can be very intelligent, indeed, and I would never mock this woman’s intelligence, and certainly not her eloquence. Self-preservation can also be quite clever. But there is a lamenting sadness in reading, at the end of her essay, that she did not earn a welcome to herself.
There are only so many times one can say “thank you” - for splendid scenes, fine dinners - before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, You aren’t being supportive lately. It’s a Frenchism to say, “Take a decision,” and from time to time I joke: from whom? Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor. Mostly I worry that if he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive, but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials.
When I say thank you that phrase will not grate because I carry what I have built for myself wherever I go, weighty as a ghost. As an adult girl I can wholeheartedly say that “thank you” is absolving. Not to brag but, you can go to fabulous parties without compromise, without exchange, without the prospect of an “age gap” marriage. Although, I do have fantasies about that: 23, falling in love with a handsome prince and I get to read Flaubert all day and drink rosè. Isn’t it pretty to think so? Although, no I don’t, my fantasies are never retroactive. I do have to say with full confidence that, god forbid, if she ever does have to rebuild herself, it would be a beautiful story, and I trust in any woman’s ability to do so. I think now of Emily Ratajkowski and her divorce rings. A few days ago she posted a slide on her Instagram with 9 pictures; some look like they’re editorial, shot from above in a vintage Rangers sweatshirt. A picture of her rings - including a thick gold band with the letters of her son’s name, SLY, encrusted with diamonds. Her at a cafe, a close-up of her with an adorable small smile, holding a glass of white wine. The caption? A woman doing girl things.
I must add at this point that I have no critique about age gap relationships. You go, girl. But to suggest it for ease instead of the daunting project of self-creation? For the reason that women will eventually have to come to terms with the fact that they age like “a funnel and men like an expanding cone.” How sterilizing! How limiting! How infantilizing! That is truly aging backwards, smaller; minimal. Compared to the girls (at any age, really, I truly do not care) with pink bows and mini skirts and businesses and blogs and a taste in wine built upon just that… tasting wine. How indulgent! How sharp! How sophisticated!
This rhetoric is precisely why I felt so compelled to valorize the adult girl. The adult girl is so delightfully anti-infantilizing because she does not prescribe to a woman’s power unequivocally diminishing (not in the way that we all lose our power, eventually). I actually believe I am frozen in time, not aging backwards like Benjamin Button, but growing riper, more fertile, gaining an incredible amount of vitality, nearly bursting at the seams with everything I am prepared to do for myself and time is just waiting for me to loop back in for a hot minute. Last October, Hype Bae published an article by Collette Grimes called “We’re All Just Teenage Girls in our 20s” labelling 2023 as “the year of the girl.” She explains,
“With the girls of the early 2000s now coming of age, many of us are looking back and realizing we were robbed of our childhoods. We hid our love for the color pink so no one thought we were stupid. We were rewarded for not being like other girls who cared about dolls and makeup. We were shamed and sexualized for our developing bodies and taught to be responsible for the actions of boys and men by the time we were ten.
Girls were never allowed to just be girls.
The recent rise of girl culture is a reclamation of the girlhood we lost. “I’m just a girl” memes and coquette blogs transform the stereotypes invoked to demean us, indulging in a sickly sweet, all-pink femininity for the pure fun of it.”
There was no winning as a girl. Grimes talks about the way girls had to diminish their likes with regards to the colour pink and make-up, ostensibly hyper-feminized stereotypes, but the girls who swore off those things were hardly better off. Now, I’m speaking from a place of always having loved the colour pink, a place of loving Barbies and sewing little dresses and two-piece floral flare sets with my mom. But I also grew up with two brothers. I fondly remember building Lego cars, watching happily as they played Mortal Kombat (I was never very good), and rummaging in the dirt looking for slugs. None of this felt like a contradiction to me. As I got older my love of fantasy grew, and I often found myself immersed in worlds of my own and I became a very solitary girl. Part of this was due to teasing; the girls would tell me, “You’re too pretty to hang out with us” and laugh at me as I hid by myself in the washroom at recess or “You’re too smart to hang out with us” after a teacher publicly applauded me for a poem I wrote. I even remember using the soap dispenser to scrub off all my stupid blue eyeshadow when I was 12 so that they might welcome me back into the friend group. In Grade 5, the boys called me “cat eyes,” and in Grade 9, I was too scared to go to my locker alone because it was surrounded by seniors who wouldn’t leave me alone. When I was in university I remember talking to a boy I liked about a new X-Men movie, and he said, “You’re not even a girl.” I was totally gutted, and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. I have always felt like my obsession with fantasy and make-believe was the girliest thing about me. I would fall asleep dreaming of discovering I was a long lost princess, or that I could fly, or that some Anakin-type chosen one would show up one day and hold my hand. In summary, I was told by both girls and boys to dumb myself down, to not wear makeup, to not draw attention, to not like science fiction. And so ultimately, I agree with Grimes: there is a very serious feeling of reclamation involved in this movement. We are reasserting our right to like and enjoy whatever the fuck we want.
The best part: the resulting return to girlhood does not negate the decades of growth and knowledge we have all acquired. The thing is, we all want to be little girls with a woman’s mind, or at least this is how I can relate. I want to be able to condone my comfort, to say it with my chest. And I think this is exactly what we are doing when we say, “I’m just a girl!” It is not a refusal of intelligence, it is not a negation at all; quite the opposite, it is a deep inner allowing and a representation of safety. An adult girl does things the way children do things - instinctually, coupled with boundaries that she has learned from adulthood. For the most part, I think we’ve managed to protect this phenomenon from misogyny, and that’s why this essay is not a defence but a valorization.
Therapy preaches going back in time to “do inner child work” as this haunting chore of scraping out the birth of our demons beneath our egos and our self-protective patterns. I remember my own journey down this path, waking up feeling exhausted, scared, enlightened, somewhat relieved - but then what? I talk to my friends about having breakthroughs in this regard and witness online how important it is for the future and health of our relationships to first get to know our inner child. I support all of this and have found personal sincerity in it. I was listening to an Indigenous creator on Instagram Live, @thecreatorcole, explain how shadow work is nothing without medicine work. Before my mind could even articulate what he meant, I was stunned; I energetically had this sense of something being missing from our Western discourse on this alleged necessary journey to the past. For me, getting to know my medicine has been the most generative form of therapy I’ve ever done and one of the only ways I’ve been able to truly see through the lies I have told myself. It breaks the walls of time and allows inner child work to be a present childish play, an adventure. I am an adult girl, and this girl’s intuition is the guide; my intellect knows what to do once we get there. It’s freedom.
In an article titled, “Are you really ‘Just a Girl’?” writer Ayjia Stanford cautions the use of this phrase turning from irony into a “conflation of girlhood with negative stereotypes.” She goes on to finish her piece with a bang, writing: “The time for women to trivialize themselves is over. As a wise woman once said, “I’ve had it up to here.” And you know what, so have I! I’ve had it up to here with having to choose between finding loopholes for mere brevity in calm waters and “trivializing” myself - is this not another way of saying that women contain multitudes? Choosing between pseudo-independence and …and what? Taking the time to get to know myself, on my own, against everyone else’s agenda? That I like skincare and that animated comic series Invincible and hot pink and long glossy Russian manicures? That I want to marvel over sunsets and imagine myself on a distant planet? It’s not naivety, it's bravery. It’s acknowledging our individual uniqueness! That I, at age 33, enjoyed listening to Taylor Swift’s new album, a 34-year-old woman? Sue me. Or, perhaps, shut the hell up. I’m well aware of the romance myth.
The fallacy I have broken since the beginning of this year is that romance includes martyrdom and boundaries like lines drawn in sand. Took me long enough!? Oh well. Romance is not a salve to old or anticipated wounds. It’s not a place to rest in a tattered gown, not a place of ease-as-opposed-to. I let the pendulum swing in that spring and summer; it swung quite far, actually. I think I fell off on one end, landed and didn’t question it, was just grateful for a surface to fall into. In that article for Hypebae, blogger Zoe London explains her hope for young women to feel safe in their healing as they disentangle themselves from “disordered disruptive behaviours.” She has created an online forum for under-18s to discuss being teenagers, monitored by their peers. She writes that she has “to do her part as an adult to make sure the subculture is healthy. You don’t have to be perfect, it’s okay to be messed up, but we’re not going to continue the cycle of fucked up-ness… what is not okay is punishing yourself for [uncomfortable feelings]. Girl blogs are a way of gently guiding young women into a positive direction by framing recovery as chic.” It’s brilliant. I am so consistently in awe of the entrepreneurship and true grit of the girls I engage with. There is value in saying, “I’m just a girl! I can’t do that right now! I’m not going to play that game, I’m going to play this game.” It’s a movement that breaks the disconnect between what we think we can have for ourselves and where our imaginations will lead us if we take control. It’s a movement of unapologetic shifting priorities.
The phases of our lives change so sweet and crisp, sometimes like an apple or a gorgeous chablis as the sun sets, but also sometimes like broken glass. Within each phase we subconsciously choose things to cling to. Last April, it was my ego. It was margaritas, it was 3 am at that bar in Kits with people who cared about me and I, them. By the end of some nights I was crying behind the bar, on others I was blasting Billy Joel’s Pianoman while myself and five regulars sang from the top of our lungs at 4 in the morning. I’ll never forget that night as long as I live. I was smoking weed with strangers, I kissed a boy, I had girlfriends who were 20 and girlfriends who were 60. Calling something a “pink job” or hearing Jake say, “It’s okay, Tatyana, you’re just a girl” while he gave me a comforting smile retracted nothing from my agency, but the liberties I took with it prevented healing on a deeper level. And the best part is, I could only know that now.
This phrase, I’m just a girl! lives and breeds, first and foremost, outside of romantic relationships. It actually has very little to do with it at all unless perhaps we want it to, but you’ll never know (girlhood is a spectrum)! I changed my entire life around in the past four years: bidding adieu to a relationship where a man dared to tell me I wasn’t “motivated” approximately six months after completing a Master’s degree and studying for the LSATs, leaving a corporate job where I worked for a gold mining company in between Toronto and South America, moving across the country simply because I wanted to buy a red car, going to acting school, getting an agent, actually finding work as an actress and writer, falling in love, falling out of love, daring to dream bigger than I ever have before, and then - falling in love, with myself. I just got off the phone with a friend and I was telling her about my daydream walks where I construct wild romances and find dragon’s eggs in Tofino, and how maybe I should monitor how far I let myself wander out of the 3D. She humbled me immediately and said: do not stop. For the adult girl, this is a generative practice and it’s where I find a good deal of creative ammunition. It makes me feel curious, like I can do anything when I harness it. A few weeks ago I was sitting by myself on the patio at this French restaurant, Coquette, wondering if this would become a pattern, these solo writing dates, wondering what my mind would assign meaning to months from now. This is what I mean when I say, I’m just a girl: I’m spending a lot of time on me, I’m on week eight of The Artist’s Way (my second round), I’m eating peanut butter out of the jar whenever the fuck I want to, I’m writing a novella, I’m nourishing new and old friendships that value play, I’m taking mushrooms and going to the library to read poetry, I am consciously choosing a single life. I’m dreaming of getting myself a kitten and naming her Princess Buttercup. And I’m not daunted by the idea of becoming my ideal self: I’m so excited to see where discipline and girlhood will take me. My intuition has always been strong, hailing from a line of Polish witches, my ancestors who could tell the future in their dreams. I can write the future with my words.
I just finished reading. Very lovely. Vaporize the girl and long live brujería.