If You Still Feel Like A Teenager In Your 20s, You're Not Alone

The Jonas Brothers are on tour, and Taylor Swift’s Speak Now is topping the charts. Hollywood stars are rocking low-rise jeans and graphic baby tees. Abercrombie is on everybody’s radar, and the indie sleaze aesthetic is rampant.

The year is 2023.

It’s a well-known fact that nostalgia sells — and in the past few years, entertainment and fashion companies have capitalized on this truism in the form of movie prequels and sequels, album re-releases, band reunions, and fashion trends. For many women in their 20s, the pop-culture obsessions they had in their teen years are still a huge part of their lives, but not because they’re considered “cool” now. Instead, they’re an escape from the actual struggles they face during young adulthood.

On TikTok, this is called “being a teenage girl in your 20s,” and the hashtag #teenagegirlinher20s has more than 594,500 views. Underneath the tag, users share things that fill them with adolescent whimsy, from recreating Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour entrance to ignoring whatever the heck a retirement plan is. According to women who identify with this term, realizing their core interests endure as they get older can be extremely validating and can remove shame they may have felt liking inherently “girly” things when they were younger.

“I wasn't the coolest [as a teenager], but I knew what I enjoyed, and I stuck with it,” says Kristen, 29, who had a childhood bedroom plastered with Jonas Brothers photos from J-14 and Tiger Beat. She even walked down the aisle at her wedding to their song “Hello Beautiful.” In fact, a decade and some change later, she helped launch Nick Jonas’ tequila brand through her work in public relations by sheer coincidence.

Newer media taps into the same teen heartache and angst as the early-aughts pop stars and is finding adult fans in the process. For example, Olivia Rodrigo’s upcoming sophomore album and Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty are tentpoles of this viral trend. Kaite, 24, says watching the Prime series as an adult makes it possible to empathize with every character, even though she would never bring up watching it to her older co-workers for fear they wouldn’t understand. “I can relate to the adults [in the show], but at the same time, I root for [the young characters] as if I’m living their lives with them,” she says.

In a world where Y2K heartthrobs are releasing solo albums or guest-starring on Call Her Daddy, it’s easy to maintain these obsessions into adulthood. Plus, having the money from full-time work makes it possible to experience them in a more tangible way.

“I have blown my savings on [concert tickets] this year because I am convinced that this is my year to have fun and be a teenager, and then I can figure sh*t out later,” says Karina, 27, who is from Nicaragua, lives in Germany, and has gone to five of Harry Styles’ European tour stops.

Alyssa, 30, splits her time between her Hoboken, New Jersey, apartment and her childhood home in Boston and thinks she’ll always feel like a teenage girl. In our 40-minute call, she brings up fan fiction 25 times and tells me she recently fulfilled her teenage dream of buying a Tiffany heart necklace.

“It’s my money, and if I want it now, I can have it. [In your 20s,] you move with this confidence and money you didn’t have [as a teen]. That only comes with age,” she says.

Still, while it’s possible for some people to financially indulge in concert tickets or jewelry they’ve coveted for years, it’s not lost on 20-something teenagers that the state of our world doesn’t lend itself to more traditional milestone investments.

“I was expecting [I’d be] getting ready to be engaged and buy a house,” says 22-year-old Meolah. Obviously, the market was in a much better place a few years ago, and today, 30 is the average age at which women in the United States get married. “Everything’s so different than what I thought it would be, and the only thing I really know is my teenage years. So, why not just retreat back to that and go from there?”

Leaning on the fixations of their teenage years looks different for everyone and can actually be legitimately healing, according to Ravin Aulak, a registered clinical counselor. “A lot of ‘girly stuff’ is talked about as not cool because it brings women together and the patriarchy doesn’t want that,” she says. “Community and connection are at the core of all healing. We can’t do it alone.”

The growing pains of being a teenager are something that young adults really do need to heal from. “Being a teenage girl is absolutely the worst thing ever. It’s grueling,” Kaite says.

In the past year, TikTok users have resurfaced the idea of the inner child, a psychological phenomenon from the 1960s which Aulak still finds relevant. “If you’re sad and it’s a wound [from when you were younger] that got hit that brought you back to your childhood, then inner-child work looks like comforting yourself the way that you would’ve wanted back then,” says Aulak, who’s skeptical of the Internet’s quickness with giving things labels, such as Peter Pan syndrome or failure to launch.

“We’re at this point in our world where we’re overpathologizing humanness, and instead of trying to ‘figure it out’ or call it a syndrome, what if we just said: ‘Hey, these are things that I enjoy and maybe they stem from my experiences, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Can I just enjoy this and know this is my identity, this is the person that I am?’”

If clinging to one’s teenage years and memories isn’t interfering with one’s ability to live one’s life to the fullest right now, Aulak thinks there’s nothing wrong with it. For the women who consider themselves teenage girls at heart, it’s an unwavering feeling. “God, I hope I always feel like this. I hope I always am this interested in something and this invested in something. I wouldn’t have it any other way,” says Kaite.

After all, as Alyssa said, “As long as we’re all growing, do we really have to grow up?”

Expert:

Ravin Aulak, registered clinical counselor and podcast host