Thoughts on Womanhood  Me not feeling like an adult very much comes along with me not feeling "womanly" and very much like a 23/24 year old teenage girl. I really started thinking more about my relationship to adulthood and my age while couch shopping. Most of the decent couches were about $1100 to $2000 which were waaaay more than what I was anticipating for a couch which was like $600-700. I did find some couches in that range but they were either low quality and uncomfortable to sit in or they were not great in terms of size. Lets just say I sat through a lot of cheap Ikea/ Nebraska Furniture Mart Couches that were kind of ugly tbh. And then I went into an Ashley Home Furniture and had another form of existential crisis. While I was still concerned about prices like in the other stores, here I distinctly felt like a child, a 23 year old teenage girl. Idk, the whole store felt like I was in a Karen's faux Italian pinterst board after she got a divorce in 2008. The vibe was very much suburban couple with 2 children from the ages of 8-12 that are settled down and financially secure.  I've written the previous post on how even though I'm an adult, I take responsibility for myself, and am emotionally mature, I don't really fit the "aesthetics" of adulthood and as a result feel like an adult. After writing that whole post, in retrospect, I think that's what I was very much reacting to when I went into Ashley Home Furniture.  Then I watched these two videos and a lot resonated with me.  I like on how this video talked about how being an adult is seen as an action rather than something you just are as well as how being adult looks different now than previous generations. I liked on how it talked about how subjective how we define adulthood it is from years that we think that adulthood begins to the expectations. The video also talked about how adulthood is defined differently in queer circles since a lot of gay people experience sexual and romantic milestones later on in life due to things like coming out and how they have different milestones to mark their lives apart from getting married and having kids, since historically for a long time gay people couldn't do those things legally. It also touches on how it's different for people of color, how in some cultures moving out isn't really a thing when it comes to coming of age and how women of color are perceived as grown younger than white women.  And I want to expand on this as it relates to my personal experiences. I think in some ways I was forced to grow up faster as a woman of color. I feel like in south asian households, if you're born a girl, you are given more responsibility and are expected to be more mature at an earlier age compared to boys but at the same time you are given less freedom than them. Given my family structure, I've often been expected to be the bigger person in the face of conflicts with my parents and other relatives despite being a child. And of course, I was sexualized at a young age because of how my body is built and I started encountering attention from creepy old men earlier than some of my other peers.  I was one of those kids that were seen as "mature for their age" and later on I found out that this isn't the flex I thought it was when I was growing up and that I was worthy of being supported instead of having to emotionally figure everything out on my own due to emotionally unavailable parents. I had portions of my life where I felt disconnected from my peers who were the same age who got to develop more normally due to the stuff that I had to go through, often alone. And as a result, I think there is a part of me that wants to hold on to girlhood because I didn't get to experience it fully when I was a child while at the same time feeling weird for being this way.  The stage of adulthood and how it is defined can also come with a set of cultural clashes when you are a child of immigrants. My parents thought it was weird on how I felt this need to leave the nest and be more independent since they both grew up in cultures where you didn't move out until you were married. And they interpreted in me wanting to achieve what is considered a milestone of adulthood here as a form of abandonment and one of the negatives of a more individualistic society. They also didn't get the whole dating and relationships bit when it comes to western coming of age milestones but luckily for them I was a late bloomer. Also, I had a curfew while living with them and a more strict set of rules compared to what my peers here experienced as adults. There are times when I see my boyfriend hanging out with me late into the night and I'm just like *aren't your parents going to kill you for being out with me at my dorm/now apartment at like 11pm* and then I have to remind myself that he is a white man and even though he lives with his parents, they have a different set of standards.  And there is a part of me that knowing the cultural context that my parents come from that no matter what I accomplish or what my over all life style looks like, they will never see me fully as an adult until after I get married and have kids.  I also think another reason why my generation is embracing girlhood more is because we see womanhood as sad and depressing because we're more aware of the realities around being a wife and mother and how it's not as it's cracked out to be from the weaponized incompetence, to being a married single mother, and all of the labor that you're expected to do all on your own with little to no help. The video below talks about how girlhood is seen as lively and whimsical and that attitude is similar to the whole *romanticize your life* trend. And in a way, it's kind of a coping mechanism to help get us through this generally speaking awful and chaotic time. It contrasts the trend of the "girl dinner" and how its seen as fun, quirky, and filled with your favorite snacks with little to no labor while when people think of "woman dinner" you imagine a woman who has toiled away for her family only to have some scraps to the side after serving everyone else.   The video above also talks about how girlhood has become a marketing trend from the "girl power" of the 90s to the "girl boss" of the 2010s. I found this video interesting in the way that it talked about various trends I have encountered in my feed and I liked how she did a deep dive into a pattern that I was already observing. I think to a certain extent I have been impacted by these trends even if I'm not directly engaging with them. I do find myself engaging with all of this in the whole "romanticizing your life" trend but it's more of a part of the my over all new year's resolution of being more delusional. Also with the Barbie movie and the Taylor Swift Era's tour, a lot of women seem to be engaging with the nostalgia of their girlhood this summer, especially white women. The Barbie movie was an interesting take on what girls experience as they transition into womenhood, how violent the realization of being in a man's world can be. And while I don't think the movie was a feminist masterpiece, parts of it did feel like 2014 tumblr, I do think that rather than providing interesting discourse, it mainly made you feel something and reflect. I felt deeply seen in many parts of the movie. As for the Taylor Swift tour, I don't much to say on that since I'm not a Taylor Swift fan but from what I've heard, it's pretty big and well done, and there is a lot of market and rampant consummerism around it much like the Barbie movie. Anyway, those two I feel really dominated this summer.  On top of that, I think for me, a lot of these past few months from like January to July where I was able to get a chill job and I was still living in my childhood home, really felt healing for my inner teenager. I've written about that quite a bit in this journal over the last few months and I just wanted to add that parts of my lifestyle really resonate with that inner teenager. During that time, my job was chill and I didn't have to worry about much and I had all this free time to do things like hang out with my friends, go to little coffee shops, work out, engage with my hobbies, sneak my boyfriend into my house while my parents were away, just typical things people in their teens would do but I didn't really get to engage with because I was stressed, depressed, and had my calander filled with a million and one extracurriculars because I was focused and anxious about getting into a good college. And I continue to do those things like working out and hanging out with my friends but I guess it feels different now that I'm living on my own. I think these past couple months as been great in terms of me feeling like I have more agency in my life. It feels good to not have to tell people where you're going, when you're bringing someone over or be worried about how long your significant other can spend at your place. And while I did have all of this in college, it's nice to be able to live alone and take responsibility from paying the bills to cooking everyday even though I wouldn't say that I enjoy those things. It still gives me a sense of agency, a sense of agency that I yearned for since I was in my teens. Maybe this feeling of being a 23 year old teenage girl will slowly fade as this becomes my norm as I ease into living by myself and being financially sufficient over the next few months.