I used to want my own coming-of-age story so badly. I wanted to turn sixteen and have everything just fall into place. I wanted stepping stones to appear, leading me directly from my tiny bedroom to a hopeful, assured future, and all I had to do was skip from one stone to another and avoid the bereft void below.
But adulthood doesn’t seem to be arriving the way I’d hoped, all adorned in garlands and a tilak on the forehead. All my adulthood milestones are going to be delayed or erased. Graduations, first apartments, marriage, and kids, all are most likely to be completely stripped of their stability. And without these cultural rites of passage, there is no clear “before” and “after”, no before Christ and Anno Domini, so life just feels like a long, dreary hallway with no doors and no glaring exit sign. Affordable housing is shrinking, costs rise while wages stay still, and the word “job” is jokingly treated as a pejorative because it feels so unattainable for most people. Adulthood has stalled, and eventually the stepping stones will stop appearing, and I’ll be left pacing the same three rocks over and over.
My childhood, too, was wrecked by overexposure to the Internet. I was given it at a young age because both my parents worked, and I had no siblings, so that glowing LED screen was all I had to fill the void. And as chronically online as I am, I have no qualms in admitting that it totally botched my childhood. No matter how careful you are, the Internet will always lead you to cadavers in dark alleys you will never recover from, as hackneyed as this may sound. In the context of this article, one of the Internet’s cruellest flaws is its open pipeline to toxic productivity culture and adult content, both of which really decimate the joy and whimsy of an eight-year-old girl. And when you grow up too fast, both online and offline, you end up hovering between stations, stranded on Platform B, wondering whether you should backtrack to A or take a blind leap to C.
You end up in this strange purgatory. You’re too old for some things at nineteen, but also too young for others at twenty-nine. You’re trapped in a cultural holding cell, and your only chance at bail is either (A) warning your childhood self to slow down, or (B) begging your future self not to give up on you.
What will become of me, once I’ve lost my novelty? … It’s like I can feel time moving, how can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?
‘Nothing New’ (Taylor’s Version), Taylor Swift feat. Phoebe Bridgers\
The Dilution of Defining Moments
Something I’ve always disliked about the internet is how it massively spoils “canon events” like heartbreak, existential crises, and more, so when they finally arrive, it’s anticlimactic. You don’t truly learn anything from them until years later because the Internet makes you fluent in emotions you haven’t even experienced yet. And at the end, all you feel is the dull disappointment of watching a movie you already know the ending to. It’s like stepping onto a stone you’ve already seen a dozen pictures of, kind of like Captain Holt’s paintings of a dozen identical rocks in S02E16 of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but even less exciting than that.
At eight years old, YouTubers taught me to do breathing exercises whenever I had anxiety attacks, so that is what I (rather unsuccessfully) did for a decade until I realised that what really worked for me was simply talking to someone. People need to arrive at these conclusions themselves, not thrown blind and headfirst into pain, of course, but allowed to build their own coping mechanisms, or learn them from a licensed therapist and not from some third-rate, heartbroken vlogger explaining how to survive a breakup. And it’s the same story everywhere: people pushed into roles they’re not meant to play yet, with years shaved off of their childhood before it’s even started to unfold.
The Commodification of Youth
Speaking of childhood, it’s strange how the same culture that rushes you into growing old also insists you never get old. Brands and media want you to stay youthful. Skincare, fashion, TikTok trends, mean fifteen-year-olds on X (formerly Twitter), everyone and everything makes ageing feel like a failure instead of the beautiful, natural process that it is. And what particularly exacerbates me is that often, this fixation on the youth is targeted back to literal children. I’ve seen TikToks of twelve-year-olds in Sephora stockpiling anti-ageing retinol serums, not realising it’s formulated for much older skin. This BBC article explains it well, but TL;DR: pre-teen girls are mass-buying serums with ingredients strong enough to potentially harm them, all because a few influencers told them to “start early.”
It makes time feel so distorted. We’re in this bizarre loop of kids slathering on anti-acne products before they’ve even had their first pimple, and adults trying to live the childhood those same pre-teens should be living. You can’t even tell who’s rushing forward and who’s clawing backwards, and in a world where everyone seems to be playing the wrong age, it feels impossible to figure out who you really want to become.
The End of RE-INVENTION
Like I said at the start, I used to want that Hollywood-film-esque coming-of-age so badly, but it’s really impossible in this day and age. Real ‘coming-of-age’ requires messy trial and error: cutting your own bangs, dyeing your hair the most horrific shade of blue, wearing denim-on-denim in a weak effort to be the first ever to pull it off. But when your whole life is documented, every mistake is immortalised forever. I’ve seen literal children on Instagram performing maturity before they’ve even lived it, and it’s so hard to make mistakes when mistakes are just cannon fodder in the artillery that is social media. You can’t just quietly disappear or reinvent yourself because there will always be an old photo, a tagged post, or an incriminating comment thread.
So we come back to the stepping stones. I’m trying my hardest to walk on them, but they’re eroding and slippery. Every step I take makes me wonder if the stones rearranged themselves into a circle, and I’ve just been moving without getting anywhere. Or maybe the stones didn’t move at all, and the only things that changed were how much I’ve grown and the size of my ambitions.
But I’ve been working really hard to try and accept the circles. It just means I get more time to look around.
“We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look behind …
And go round and round and round
In the circle game”
‘The Circle Game’, Joni Mitchell
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