As the owner of nine of the most painfully embarrassing books ever written, I can attest that nothing quite compares to the humiliation and exhilaration of being a 14-year-old girl. However, as I reflect on my teenage years and flip through my old diaries, I realize that the experience was far from unique. If anything, it was a rite of passage that most girls go through, filled with both beauty and pain.
As I flip through the pages of my diaries, chronicling everything from my first kiss to my struggles with an eating disorder, I am transported back to a time when I felt awkward and insecure in my own skin. My diaries are a time capsule of millennial girlhood, filled with references to webcams, epilators, chain emails, and long conversations on MSN.
Yet, as I read through my diaries cover to cover, I cannot help but feel that teenagers are uniquely cruel to one another, not in the cartoonish way depicted in teen romcoms, but in ways that are more insidious and mundane. Reading Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” I was struck by how the book portrays the unfixable mistakes that teenagers make and the guilt they feel when they cause harm to others.
Looking back on my own teenage years, I realize how much I craved attention and validation from boys. My diaries are filled with the names of boys who caught my eye, and the lengths I went to get them to notice me. But it was a desperate combination of feeling ugly and wanting to be called beautiful that made me do things that I am not proud of. I manipulated boys into liking me just to boost my ego, and I relied on their attention to feel good about myself.
As I reflect on my teenage years, I am grateful for the lessons I learned and the person I have become. I am no longer that awkward, insecure girl, and I am proud of the woman I have become. My diaries are a reminder of where I came from, but they no longer define who I am.
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