One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“This has been my experience in life trying to navigate my feminine interests. Early on, I owned my truth and proudly chatted about the hyperfeminine things I liked, before I understood their labeling as superficial, only to be silenced when I was told they aren’t things a woman should like in order to be taken seriously. You’ll later read how this has impacted me well into my thirties, where I now feel the need to order a pumpkin spice latte (PSL) incognito, so I don’t appear too ‘basic’ upon drinking a cozy fall treat.”

Kennedy uses the Teen Talk Barbie as an entry point to her discussion on femininity and coming of age during the nineties and aughts, speaking to The Influence of Media and Culture on Women’s Identities. She argues that toys like the Mattel doll taught her to both love and be ashamed of particular trends. She is identifying the lasting psychological impacts of these dynamics in this passage, and thus creating links between the various essays in her collection.

“There was a more casual ‘crack an egg on your head’ version that would end on a less bleak note, dare I say a euphoric one, I still think about often: ‘Tight squeeze, cool breeze, now you’ve got the shiveries.’ I have shiveries thinking about the kindness and safety in sisterhood I found in the close friends willing to do a round of egg-cracking shivers while sitting crisscross applesauce at a school assembly or a Girl Scout meeting. I hate sleeping on the floor but love sitting on the floor, and if I can get my hair played with or my back scratched in the process, I’ll hang on to your friendship tighter than if you had a second fridge.”

Kennedy’s vivid descriptions of her and her friends’ childhood games reify her girlhood connections. She is using specific examples from her childhood to invite the reader into her personal experience and to illustrate the ways in which her early female friendships taught her to rely on women’s support and encouragement.

“We’re now so deep in the worlds of Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok that I think we forget about the social-networking stairsteps that were far from blips on the radar. From 1997 to 2009, twelve years of my life, AIM was my watercooler. As I’ve come to appreciate in retrospect, it was also kind of a safe space for trying on different versions of myself at an age where I lacked a strong sense of identity. Although from the screen names we chose, it was already pretty clear we were all hanging by a thread. Unbeknownst to us, these questionable choices would represent our digital identities for years to come.”

Kennedy’s descriptions of and allusions to the AOL Instant Messenger era support her overarching explorations concerning media and technology. Kennedy is combining specific cultural data with personal anecdotes in order to address The Impact of Media and Technology on Relationships.

“I’m not here to talk anyone out of anything; I’d rather make a case for the importance of being discerning toward the figures of authority, mentors, and influences that teach young people about their hearts, bodies, and souls. I’m not against religion, I’m against how people with spiritual authority use religion to control, ostracize, and oppress, and how Christian doctrine can be conveniently interpreted to further a time period’s social or political agenda.”

Kennedy uses qualifying phrases and diction in order to appeal to a diverse array of readers. Kennedy is taking a stance on religion and Christianity throughout the essay, but she doesn’t claim ultimate authority over these topics. Rather, she makes a claim that aligns with her experiential data. Her tone and stance in this passage render her essay non-threatening and non-confrontational.

“Dress codes are another secular manifestation of purity culture, where young women are taught that they’re expected to control other people’s behavior through how they dress. Yet in my experience, no one policed the staring or inappropriate comments or touching with the same intensity, if at all. Looking back on this, the audacity of school officials to pull a young woman out of class due to how a garment fits her body is some puritanical patriarchal nonsense that we should all find truly horrifying.”

Kennedy employs an assertive tone as she creates links between secular and Christian culture in her upbringing. These assertions about purity, autonomy, and sexuality resound throughout the collection and develop Kennedy’s explorations concerning the dangerous effects of pop culture on teen psychology.

“I can’t speak to how all Christians are taught, but from my experience, we were told to worship a figure with male pronouns blindly, told we’re worthless and broken without him, and although we can never question the standards we’re held to, we must constantly repent for all the ways we’ll inevitably fall short of them. And the only solution for the looming threat of wrath or punishment from this alleged father figure was to praise, worship, and obey harder.”

Kennedy contextualizes her assertions about Christian culture within her own childhood experiences. She resists claiming ultimate authority over these beliefs but does own her experience and the ways in which her church involvement negatively impacted how she saw herself.

“Obviously, this wasn’t everybody’s goal; I don’t want to project my quest for sameness onto all millennials, especially those of you who had the confidence not to care, or the wisdom to understand something I’d realize later, how oppressive this pursuit can be to individual circumstances that separate people from the status quo. I know this goal was far from noble, but honestly, I didn’t want to stand out as much as I wanted to appear ‘normal,’ and in my experience, a handful of people dictated how that was defined.”

Kennedy combines multiple tonal registers to appeal to her reader and claim a definite stance about identity. She combines more colloquial diction with more academic diction, which evidences her authorial reach. Furthermore, her stylistic choices in this passage capture her childhood perspective and her evolved adult perspective simultaneously.

“If not, you can see how stereotypes take shape to create a predictable mold instead of real experiences that explore the contours of the human existence. To quote another, far more inimitable bell I mentioned earlier, bell hooks, ‘Stereotypes abound when there is distance,’ And while I knew this about who was on the screen, it didn’t click for me until recent years how a lack of diversity behind the screen likely played a profound role in a lot of my development of biases along the way.”

Kennedy uses cultural references from the aughts in her explorations of feminism, racism, and other cultural biases. She is also using wordplay by referencing bell hooks amidst her in-depth examination of Saved by the Bell. This playful language softens Kennedy’s bolder claims and more philosophical examinations.

“Sometimes I wonder what college would have been like without Facebook albums, which were added to the interface during my freshman year. It was hard enough to compare yourself to people in person, but with the advent of social media, it became an exaggerated performance, and I bought it; the college version of popular-girl handwriting was copying the style of the unbothered party girl.”

Kennedy creates parallels between her overarching thematic explorations by combining references to her subsequent essays in the same passage. Alluding to social media, performance, PGH, and partying in the same paragraph establishes more overt links between Kennedy’s diverse coming-of-age experiences. Furthermore, this formal choice suggests that the entirety of Kennedy’s cultural context is responsible for influencing her identity.

“I feel sad when people talk about loving college, because learning to hate myself is one of the things I remember most about it. The worst part is, it felt normal. While I don’t want to project this onto everyone, from what I observed, it was pretty common to openly talk shit about your body in the mid-2000s.”

Kennedy uses conversational language to make her discussion of mental health accessible. Words like “sad,” “loving,” “hate,” “worst,” and “normal” render Kennedy’s particular mental health experiences familiar. She avoids esoteric, academic, and medical language in an effort to talk more openly and honestly about her relationship with her body and her outlook on herself.

“I don’t know if other millennials feel this way, but I didn’t know anything about mental health until the 2010s, when I started to hear people talk about it more. I thought the contents of our minds were a cause-effect formula dictated by our surroundings, like the Dow Jones, or our experiences alone, or represented a punishment-reward system from God. So when I would be in a dark space, instead of getting help, I just felt guilty, knowing my life wasn’t that hard and assuming if I felt bad, it was my choice, or I deserved it.”

Kennedy uses a vulnerable, forthcoming tone in her discussion of mental health issues. She attempts to appeal to her reader in this way, as she is also creating room for other millennials’ experiences as she simultaneously shares her personal experience.

“I can’t believe I’ve come this far to openly share this all in this book or on the podcast. My online identity prior to, like, 2017 didn’t represent my truth at all; I would have never openly admitted to mental-health issues, deeper struggles, fears, or regrets. But the irony is, the only way I got comfortable talking about mental health is by hearing and seeing other people talk about it online whom I related to, and if they could normalize it, so could I.”

Kennedy’s ability to describe and own her mental health issues on the page captures her personal growth. Kennedy claims that she still has room to grow in these areas, but she is also allowing herself to feel self-pride by tracing her self-regard and expression over time.

“Unlike familial love from my parents or platonic love from friends, my impression of romantic love from men wasn’t grounded in reality or experience, mainly because it was literally a product of consuming fiction. I’m convinced my entire impression of love and romance was built from obsessing over romantic lyrics, charming teen heartthrobs, romantic comedies, TV couples, and other sources of fiction that would cause me to exaggerate, romanticize, main-character, and take things too literally, resulting only in the theatrics of my ongoing disappointment.”

Kennedy creates an argument that correlates media representations of romance to unrealistic expectations about love. This passage introduces the thesis for Kennedy’s overarching explorations throughout the essay “Kate Expectations,” and thus invites the reader into the pages that follow.

“I’ve since loosely pathologized what I think is a partial source of putting up with these god-awful experiences with guys: my God-given tendency to think it was normal to be broken and to look to a male figure for redemption and validation. Weirdly, there are many parallels between the methods used by the church to make you think you’re broken and the spirits moving through you, just as there are ways love songs make you think God must’ve spent a little more time on you is what someone’s thinking when they want to do you.”

Kennedy parallels love songs and worship music in order to fortify and complicate her explorations concerning romance and love. Kennedy is suggesting that the proverbial Prince Charming and the church both taught young girls that they were in need of saving. These cultural intersections develop Kennedy’s ongoing exploration of The Influence of Media and Culture on Women’s Identities.

“While the music in this era may have further exacerbated my fragile emotional state and, at times, made me feel helpless, I still believe there’s value in how it made me feel hopeful. And I wasn’t entirely wrong, because once I found love, I’d argue it exceeded all of my Kate Expectations. Because better than fiction written by someone else, it was real. And it was mine.”

Kennedy ends her essay “Kate Expectations” on a positive, uplifting note. She doesn’t negate the complicated arguments she has made in the preceding pages but uses a hopeful tone to conclude the piece. Doing so lends Part 2 a neat resolution while capturing Kennedy’s capacity for gratitude and positivity.

“Nothing surprises me more in hindsight than that I even had the audacity to start a company; it was an exhilarating but brutal process trying to navigate how to start a business from scratch and do it on the side of my nine-to-five, completely bootstrapped. I met sides of myself that I didn’t know existed; in this context, I was a person who was much more strong-willed, confident, and resourceful, and my existing verbal and client-facing skills made me get a lot of media opportunities since people were salivating for a girl-boss story.”

Kennedy’s ability to own her accomplishments captures her personal growth. Throughout the collection, Kennedy details her struggles to feel proud of and to believe in herself. In this passage, Kennedy’s tone is more self-affirming, which captures how she has changed since her young adulthood.

“A lack of accolades can get me down, too, but doesn’t compromise my identity; it was the first time I wondered if my inability to place my self-worth in institutionalized metrics was actually healthy. The thing about being your own boss is that no one else is going to tell you that you’re doing a good job, and I’ve watched a lot of people suffer as a result. I think I’ve managed to stay afloat in self-employment because I find the effort gratifying, I’m confident in my ability to figure things out, and I know if it doesn’t work out, I’ll find something else. I always do.”

Kennedy embraces a buoyant, positive tone at the end of “B There in Five” in order to project positive, success stories for women. This passage is also interrogating the notion that millennials are lazy and haphazard, by lauding Kennedy’s personal vocational successes.

“While I don’t think this playground folklore was necessarily designed to push an agenda, I think its ubiquity and oversimplification proves how the expectations, order, and terms of marriage and motherhood are embedded into our psyche from a very young age. The nursery rhymes and fairy tales and general fanfare surrounding your wedding and babies start so early, it’s less of an option you learn about than it is the framing for what you build your life around.”

Kennedy crafts a complex argument concerning culturally-disseminated expectations for women in “The Parent Trap.” In this passage, she is analyzing how girlhood pastimes train young girls to limit who they can be and what they can do with their lives. She expounds upon these notions throughout the remainder of the essay.

“Being pro-choice isn’t an extremist position, it simply allows for nuance. Advocates like me are painted as people who want to harm innocent lives, but it’s the opposite. I want to care for the precious lives on this earth and ask people to have empathy for the insurmountable challenges like the ones I’ve detailed that people go through in bringing life here, and hopefully find the humility to admit that we cannot possibly know what is best for everyone and should not be making choices for them.”

Kennedy’s discussion of Roe v. Wade deepens and complicates her examination of marriage and motherhood. Kennedy uses a declarative and assertive authorial voice in this passage in order to take a definite stance on these controversial issues.

“I fully believe there are many equally valid paths to parenthood, be it IVF, surrogacy, donation, adoption, marrying a partner with children, or otherwise. This worked for our circumstances, and to me, it’s not a matter of what it means about me as a woman or wife, or of abstract pride; it was a medical path pursued that, to be fair, comes with a lot of emotion, which you should honor.”

Kennedy makes room for her readers’ experiences amidst her description of her own childbirth experiences. She describes how she has tried to start a family, but she avoids identifying her experience as the only path to having kids. Doing so renders her voice empathetic and gracious.

“As I sipped my seasonal drink, it was a bit bleak trying to discern what interests were actually mine, fearing I’ve curated my existence based on how I want to be perceived, not who I am. While it bums me out that the Spice Girls are one of the last times I remember enjoying something without factoring in peer approval, the truth is it became such a familiar experience, I guess I normalized it to the point where I no longer noticed it.”

Kennedy uses her experience at a Starbucks café as an entry point to her conversation on taste, style, and identity. Her controversial Pumpkin Spice Latte order is symbolic of Kennedy’s personal taste, and thus it is a way for her to explore her journey towards owning who she is without shame. This contributes to her discussion about Self-Discovery and Personal Growth in the Modern World. In a society driven by online, faux identities and anonymous commentary, Kennedy is working towards developing herself beyond the desires of others.

“As I’ve been writing this book, I’ve tried to reframe unfair millennial stereotypes in a similar fashion; we take and leave what we want, define them how we please. Maybe we can choose what they mean to us, where we insert the laugh track, and choose not to internalize it. I’ve often wondered if words like ‘lazy’ and ‘entitled’ look less insulting when they’re contextualized from a different point of view. In many ways, we’re just misunderstood.”

Kennedy expands her overarching discussions by addressing the larger millennial experience in the collection’s penultimate essay. She moves away from the hyperpersonal and uses the first person plural point of view in order to relate her experiences to the collective whole.

“Even though I have no idea what’s ahead for me, I thought about trying this exercise for some chapters, to see if I could illustrate my point that sometimes life happens in the most unsuspecting of places, when we’re wasting time, rotting our brains, being girlish and allegedly unserious, dressing as a spice, or maybe relentlessly pursuing popularity, boys, or a key to a McMansion in the afterlife.”

Kennedy uses her final essay as a way to conclude her book’s overarching explorations and commentaries. True to her distinct style, she incorporates personal anecdotes, colloquial diction, and cultural references in order to humanize her writing and viewpoint. Furthermore, this passage affects a reflective tone.