For the first time ever, I'm concerned that the number of times I've been personally yeeted around the sun will affect whether I get a room to rent or not, or get hired or not.
Like... the fuck?
Hi. I've never acted like a "traditional" woman. It's just not who I am. I'm a Millennial.
Millennials are weird, silly creatures.
We have a weird sense of humor. We can act childish, because we know the value that 'fun' serves in a healthy life. Some of us have families and kids, and some don't.
We create weird art. We eat memes for breakfast, and have gaming Youtube channels. Our culture is internet culture because WE STARTED IT.
We're not how Humans - men and women - used to be. The way we are in society would make someone up to the 1990's piss their pants.
We were born at the start of the Internet Age. We have experience with both rotary phones and smart phones - that we developed (because, honestly, fuck rotary phones. You had to work for that 9. It's akin to how you had to push the 7 button on a cell phone 4 times to get an "S" when texting.) We lived with dial-up for only a few short years before we ripped our hair out of our skulls from frustration, cried out in one voice, "FUCK THIS BULLSHIT!" and created DSL, and then Wifi. Millennials have collective PTSD from that dial-up sound.
If you remember it, I dare you to tell me that you didn't hear that sound effect in your head after reading this, and got a shiver of discontent up your spine.
We proudly display our nerd collections of whatever we're into, and have beds covered in plushies.
Some of us (like me) are single and fine with living our lives without caring that we're "supposed to" be married by now, or "supposed to" be husband/wife hunting, or "supposed to act our age."
I am a she/her, but I sure as hell am not a traditional woman the way previous generations defined it.
We reinvented what "acting your age" means, and broke free of those roles created for a society that doesn't exist anymore.
It means to be yourself, be who you are and not try to fit yourself into a mold you were never made for.
So of course we don't present ourselves the way we're "supposed to." Of course we don't fall into traditional roles and adhere to old expectations of us. Of course we aren't beholden to antiquated norms of a bygone era.
We're vastly different humans in the way we think, act, dress, behave, and approach life.
We saw how "the way it's always been" has made those before us miserable, saw behind the curtain of "the way it's always been," saw that it never had to always be that way, we saw who invented it, brainwashed society to believe it for generations, and saw how the few benefited from it. We saw that "the way it's always been" has always been about control. We never wanted to live that way. We never wanted to be controlled like that. We saw what it did to older people in our lives. Why should we conform to that? Why should we have to suffer like that just because they did? They never had to.
We saw how important mental health truly is.
We studied and learned that ADHD and Austim have multiple complex levels for multiple types of people.
We saw the turn of a new millennium - the start of a new 1000 year cycle.
I graduated from High School in 2000.
I rang in the new year with my family at home, and RPing online with my friends in a Star Wars chat room to the first song I personally heard that played (pre recorded performance) on Dick Clark's New Years' Rockin' Eve. A song that would define the new millennium:
"Who Let The Dogs Out" - by Anslem Douglas. It was popular from 98 through 99. It was everywhere. (the Baha Men covered it in 2000. They didn't write it.)
I'm not kidding.
That was the first song I heard to start off a brand new thousand year cycle.
Kinda fits the past two decades, though tbh.
We grew up being told that we are the future, and to make the future our own - to make the world a better place, to fix their mistakes - and that's exactly what we're doing.
We were told to build a new and better world, yet those before us complain that we're ruining everything.
Listen, Chuck, to build something new, to fix something broken, the old (some of the old) has to be removed. Sometimes something is so broken, or so wrong that it's not worth saving. A lot of social norms had to go. A lot of ideology and mindsets had to be dumpster'd.
They wanted us to build a new and better world? Then don't complain when we have to tear the old rotting house down to rebuild it from the ground up to do it.
We were handed one HELL of a construction job. Yet through all the pushback, we still said "Hold my beer" and got to work.
A 43 year old woman in the 90's and a 43 year old woman in the 2020s are not the same creature.
We're a completely different type of Human.
There's never been a generation like this before us, because there's never been a time in Human history like this before us.