How to Grow Up

And Resist Being a Girl Forever

Two Girls on a Lawn (1889) by John Singer Sargent

As soon as I could run, I would run. I have vivid memories of running around a playground at recess - knees skinned, pigtails flailing, screams wailing. I would dance across my front yard in the summer in a swimsuit, skipping over a sprinkler turned on to water the dormant, yellow grass. I would loudly run around grocery stores in light-up sneakers and quietly around my grandparents' house in socked feet.

There’s a brazen nature to children that must be admired. They aren’t loud and flagrant out of arrogance, or because of some deliberate defiance of social norms. They lack censorship because they literally do not know any better. They start life from scratch and adopt cultural customs little by little each day until they’re tall and strong and can no longer scream in a grocery store without turning heads. I think that’s why so many people are inspired by the thoughts and behaviors of children; they move through the world unbridled, viewing matters through a lens unencumbered by social conventions, even if just for a little while.

After some time, of course, that raucousness is restrained. People assimilate into their role as adults, learning when and where it’s okay to scream and run around and when and where you must be quiet. There is undoubtedly some validity in this - a world full of noisy, rambunctious grown-ups would be chaotic. But there’s also a kind of mourning, as well as a healthy dose of shame.

Shame is a feeling I’ve been revisiting as I ease more and more into my role as an adult. I’m turning twenty-three this year. Twenty-three feels firmly and squarely adult in a way that twenty-two does not. Twenty-three is the kind of age my eyes would have widened upon hearing about at age six. Teenage ages were glamorous to me in elementary school, as a viewer of copious Disney Channel shows featuring fashionable high schoolers. But twenty-three would have simply been unknown to me as a kindergartener. My brain just assumed life stopped after age eighteen.

The shame I’m flirting with nowadays isn’t a new phenomenon to me. I can remember experiencing it as a clumsy middle schooler, realizing that it was coolest for a girl to appear quiet and uninterested in most matters. Of course, if that was, in actuality, the metric for “cool” I was definitely falling short, as an eager-to-please student, constantly raising my hand out of concern for my participation score in class. But I was well aware that my enthusiasm for school, for ballet class, for One Direction - for just about anything - when left unchecked, was decidedly lame.

I recently read a quote from film director Greta Gerwig on this depletion of expressed confidence and passion in young girls undergoing puberty in a story for Vogue. Referencing the 1994 parenting book Reviving Ophelia, Gerwig says of adolescent American girls: “They’re funny and brash and confident, and then they just - stop.”

A still from Gerwig’s Little Women (2019), a story that, in part, interrogates this decline in confidence and passion that Gerwig refers to.

As a preteen, I first realized that I am being perceived by people outside of my own head. Developing alongside visual-centric social media platforms like Instagram emphasized this realization in bold font. All adolescents experience this awareness, but for girls, it’s a uniquely visceral reality to grapple with. 

Girls become aware quite young that there is value in investing in their outward appearance. They learn that beauty is a form of currency and that they’re soon approaching what society will deem their “peak” physical form - they will be at their richest. And before they know it, their riches will soon diminish: they’ll age. They learn to be greedy with this newfound asset, like Gollum tracking and hoarding his precious. They’re never fully content with what they have, and always seeking to accumulate more. They learn that there is value in becoming more in line with the conventional standard of beauty, at which power supposedly accrues. They develop skincare routines and makeup routines and haircare routines and invest time into selecting the perfect outfit for each occasion they attend - trying their hardest to appear online and offline as mature, beautiful, and decidedly unbothered.

Since there is no maximum beauty threshold one can hit - since one can always have a smoother face, slimmer body, and more delicate features - girls learn to be apologetic about their appearance. About not being perfect. “Sorry I look like sh*t,” they mutter to friends upon meeting them at the mall. “Oh my God, no I look awful,” they respond to compliments. And this apologetic nature - this sense that they’ll never fully realize their physical potential, never look or act good enough because there’s always better to look or act - spills into the rest of their life. They go from cartwheeling across public parks to holding their tongues at lunch tables, calculating how to laugh at friends’ jokes in the least strident manner.

When a woman reaches young adulthood, this shame doesn’t necessarily disappear, rather it shifts form. You don’t quit apologizing, you just shift the subject upon which you’re asking for forgiveness. It suddenly dawns on you that all that time that you were worried about not looking or acting good enough as a teenager, you were actually the closest you would ever be to Western culture’s beauty ideal, in all its pedophilic glory. 

In Susan Sontag’s The Double Standard of Aging, she explains how men are offered two standards of good looks throughout life: the boy and the man. The boy is the teenage heartthrob most heterosexual girls have grown up admiring. Softer, effervescent, youthful, not so dissimilar from the defining physical attributes of a teenage girl. Once boys pass over into manhood, they adopt the good looks of a man; they’re allowed to become heavier, rougher, and scratchier. The lines on their face indicate wisdom and character and their grey hair signifies experience. Given their personal assets and accolades, lines on their face don’t hold them back from nabbing a young wife or being crowned “Sexiest Man Alive!” by People magazine. 

When girls cross over into womanhood, they aren’t offered a mature aesthetic ideal to graduate to. There is no standard of beauty for women that stands apart from the standard of beauty for girls - the conventions remain the same. Sontag argues that being a beautiful woman in modern society demands women to preserve their girlhood, arrest their youth. When one compliments an older woman on her appearance, they’re commending her ability to freeze time. People tweet side-by-side comparison photos of beautiful women like Beyoncé, whose face manages to look the same at 41 as it did at 18. They praise actresses like Anne Hathaway for “aging gracefully,” when in reality, they’re applauding her ability to pass time without letting any of it show on her face. Smooth skin, free of facial lines and fat, big eyes, a body free of hair from the chin down - to look like a beautiful woman is to look like a girl.

Screenshot from The Unpublishable on Substack.

Of course, the time when a woman looks most like a girl is incidentally when she actually is a girl. Attempting to approximate that age can be aided with filler and Botox, but can never fully be recreated. According to Sontag, under a system with such backward, pedophilic standards of beauty, aging for women is “a humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification.” This process doesn’t suddenly kick-off when a woman reaches a certain age, rather it commences as soon as she’s cognizant of the aging double standard. When she realizes that with each passing second, she is being deemed less valuable under patriarchy.

I possess copious privileges as a young, able-bodied woman in this culture. And I am also aware of the subtle ways in which my slouch toward disqualification has already begun. As a third-year college student, I remember friends telling me that the fraternities across the street from our apartment only admitted freshmen girls to parties. I find myself staring too long at photos of myself at sixteen, reassuring myself that I was in fact in a child’s body and it’s good that that’s no longer the case.

Sontag writes that “In protecting themselves as women, [women] betray themselves as adults.” Making women feel ashamed about aging is akin to cutting their life short. It’s convincing them that all that they are and were in the first quarter of their time on Earth is all that they should ever want to be. That they should forever want to be children in physical stature and intellectual capability. That they should feel ashamed of growing up.

This way of thinking couldn’t be more limiting because being a child is incredibly limiting. Our childhood years are important parts of our lives, as we develop our brains and learn lessons to carry through life. But stepping into adulthood, while scary, means stepping into a new kind of potential - wrought with independence, curiosity, and adventure. Seeking to freeze time by investing in faux miracle creams, drinking phony magic elixirs, and experiencing and peddling shame to others only restrains women from stepping into this potential.

On the alternative to aging with shame, Sontag writes:

“Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible… they can become women much earlier - and remain active adults, enjoying the long erotic career of which women are capable, far longer.”

Oddly enough, I’ve found that when I step into womanhood more fully, embracing the fact that with each passing day, I’m growing wiser, stronger, and more in touch with myself, I return to that child-like sense of wonder and play. Abandoning the restraints of shame as an aging woman likens screaming and running loose like I once did as a kindergartener running around a sprinkler, unaware of the status quo. Life can really begin when you let it push you along.

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Aging is a topic that I have written about several times on Cafe Hysteria before. In this article, I write more about the media’s contribution to the young beauty standard, and in this article (one of the first ones on this blog), I write a more personal narrative about my experience with aging so far (similar to the article you just read). Aging is a topic that I see myself returning to again and again through writing as I grow older. I recognize that my sphere of knowledge on the topic is rather limited and I look forward to seeing what I learn with time.