If girlhood was something we rushed through or never really got, it’s almost funny how loudly it has reappeared in our thirties. Open any of my group chats and you’ll find the same language looping like a chorus: “the girls are going out”, “call the girls”, “girl, listen to me.”

The rest of my life is aggressively adult. I am the emergency contact for myself. I understand insurance. And yet, the moment I step into a living room where my closest friends are sitting cross-legged on the floor with iced coffee, the entire energy shifts.

We are the girls, and we are home

There are the shrieks and groans and dramatic re-enactments. There are the outfit approvals. There are the screenshots of texts and DMs we would never admit to caring about in public.

It’s not that the problems are smaller now. If anything, they are bigger. We’re talking about IVF cycles, break-ups with people we thought we’d marry, burnout, parents’ illnesses. We are in the long, unglamorous middle of our lives.

A Sacred Silliness

There is a sacred silliness in these spaces. I mean silly as in unguarded. We scream-sing lyrics. We make up theories about men based on their choice of sneakers. We gossip, not as a low form of conversation, but as an art form.

It looks frivolous from the outside. It isn’t. This is how we run diagnostics on our lives.