The death of the teenage dream

I’ll blow out the candles, happy birthday to me

Got your whole life ahead of you, you’re only 19

But I fear that they already got all the best parts of me

And I’m sorry that I couldn’t always be your teenage dream

The night before my 20th birthday, I paced my room for an hour. Olivia Rodrigo’s “Teenage Dream” and Lorde’s “Perfect Places” played over in my headphones as I mourned something I hadn’t quite lost yet. I thought I would miss being 19 —
or anything-teen for that matter. I thought I would miss calling myself a “teenager.” I thought I would miss listening to music and watching TV, knowing that the content I loved was both for and about me. I would miss being this young. And before I knew it, I was 20. I was in my 20s. My parents got married in their 20s.

I can’t be in my 20s. I still feel like a teenager. 

But as I finally got into bed and accepted my 20s, I began to consider the truth — I had hated being a teenager. I had absolutely hated it. 

I once read a quote that said teenagers are so frustrated because they’re “treated like children and expected to behave like adults.” Hormonal, angry and infantilized, teenagers are expected to perform to unreasonable academic and social standards. Those who are privileged enough to attend college are often reminded that the fate of the rest of their lives rests in their 15-year-old hands.

When I came home for Thanksgiving during my freshman year of college, I went driving with my best friend.

“I realized why I was so miserable in high school,” she had told me. “I couldn’t go to bed on time because of lacrosse and all my homework, and then I was up at the crack of dawn every single day. I didn’t sleep.”

Adolescence is a time when your body and mind actively work against you. You’re expected to take on immense responsibility and be an active part of a school system proven to be hazardous to your health, all while having your freedoms restricted and your problems mocked by former teenagers who seem to have forgotten what it was like. And you enter this stage under the deluded assumption that you’re about to experience the “best years of your life.” So when you live the teenage years and they suck, you’re bound to think it’s just you.

Everything I watched and read pressured me to have these “best years of my life” but only made me more miserable. I thought I was the only one not having any fun. I walked out of my high school graduation with no tears in my eyes knowing that if I wanted to keep in touch with the people I was leaving, then I would. I remember people asking me all night if I was sad, I just asked them what I had to be sad about. I was finally out. 

There are things that you don’t notice until they go missing. Like when your best friend stays home from school sick and you realize how lonely the day will be without them. I don’t think I realized how much light I held behind my eyes until I first became a teenager and it all left. The ages of 17 and 18 were the times I recovered the personhood I lost at 14; I wasn’t all me yet, but I was closer than I was before. At 19, I felt closer to myself than I had been since middle school.

So at 19 years and 364 days old, in my bedroom, listening to “teenage dream,” I mourned 17, 18 and 19. They had been OK. They had been better than 13, 14, 15 and 16. But maybe that’s all they were — the better end of teenage-hood. Maybe the fact that I wasn’t mourning 13, 14, 15 or 16 was telling. Maybe I didn’t like being a teenager at all. Maybe what I really liked was autonomy and living on my own terms. Maybe I liked getting older. 

So if I’m happier now, if I feel better, if I feel freer, if being a teenager wasn’t any fun at all, if I have an identity outside of my clothes and the pictures I post, why am I pacing in my bedroom in the middle of the night? Why can’t I let go of something I hated so much?

They all say that it gets better, it gets better the more you grow

Yeah, they all say that it gets better, it gets better, but what if I don’t?

I can’t pretend that my inability to leave behind what I hated has nothing to do with something I loved — TV. Rory Gilmore suffered her mental breakdown from academic stress four years older than I had mine. So maybe that seemed like a college problem. And it wasn’t about the fact that Serena van der Woodsen could jet off to France at a moment’s notice before she could legally vote. It was the fact that the CW had tricked me into thinking that there was a similar level of autonomy that would come with my teenage years — that people would respect my choices, even if they disagreed with them, because I was worth listening to. Or, being 16 at the same time as Sarah Cameron, I had least hoped it would all be fun.

It wasn’t. 

And social media hasn’t gotten better. Because now we’re not young women, we’re “teenage girls in our 20s” (i.e. the TikTok trend, categorizing young women who enjoy pop culture while being older than 20). Young women in their 20s feel the need to refer to themselves this way to make excuses for allowing their interests and hobbies, often related to their stereotypically youthful clothing or “fangirl” activities, to follow them into their 20s. Adults around this age used to feel pressure to settle down and start families (pressure put on a younger demographic by societal pressures and a lower life expectancy). But if we generally have longer lives to live, why should we feel the need to infantilize ourselves to excuse having youthful joy in our 20s? Why should we feel embarrassed or ashamed for taking advantage of living our lives or reclaiming the youthful joy we denied ourselves during our teenage years? And what the hell does that have to do with being a teenager?

It relies on the idea that the teenage experience is the height of your life’s fun, and that after that you’re a boring adult and a slave to capitalism. But again, who’s to say you weren’t one during your teenage years? And when you have fun or feel free during your adult years, are you “feeling like a teenager,” or are you a human adult equally as capable of having fun as a teenager, if not more so? 

Maybe we pace in our bedrooms fueled by prebirthday dread because we feel like we’re running out of time — like there’s something we’re supposed to achieve by 30 and once we’re in our 20s we need to start working towards it, even if we don’t know what “it” is. So we treat the teenage years like the end of something instead of the beginning. Media has taught us that our teenage years are the peak of something, and not the messy and miserable transition period they actually are.

So, the teenage dream is dead. I think someone killed it a long time ago and never told the rest of us. And I don’t say any of this negatively — 13- to 19-year-olds, the teenage dream is dead! There’s no pressure! It’s not the worst thing in the world to not peak in high school. The teenage dream is dead. If high school wasn’t the time of your life, then the time of your life is yet to come. 

The teenage dream is dead. And maybe there’s nothing to mourn.

TV Beat Editor Olivia Tarling can be reached at tarling@umich.edu.

Related articles