It’s interesting the things we tie our identity to.
Yesterday I had the urge to ask my boyfriend if he thinks I’m cool. Growing up, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t, so this is one of the first periods of my life where I have enough confidence to even ask anyone that. The cool girl spiral began because not one but TWO of my friends used the adjective to describe me in the same week.
Cool.
I don’t know why it stuck with me so much. Maybe because “cool” feels like one of those things you’re never supposed to consciously want to be. Wanting to be smart is respectable. Wanting to be kind is respectable. Wanting to be successful is practically mandatory. But wanting to be cool is embarrassing because the second you care too much about being cool, you’ve already failed.
Still, I liked hearing it.
I think part of me has spent the last year quietly constructing a girl aesthetic and then pretending I wasn’t doing that.
I travel. I have weird side quests. I throw parties. I write things on the internet. I know enough niche places to recommend somewhere when someone asks what we should do. I have stories. I have a lot of friends. I care about clothes and nails and pictures and whether something looks good on an Instagram story.
None of these things are fake. I genuinely like them.
But sometimes I wonder where liking things ends and building a character begins.
The internet gives us a little museum dedicated to ourselves.
Here are my vacations.
Here are my friends.
Here is what I wore.
Here is the concert I went to.
Here is me being funny.
Here is me being hot.
Here is proof that I have a life.
And I do have a life. A very big one, actually.
That’s what makes the whole thing confusing.
This year I have reconnected with myself. Last year I spent a lot of time talking about what I wanted. Talking about wanting to create again, wanting to travel more, and wanting to pour more into my friendships. This year has been centered around rediscovering the things that I love and how they make up my personality.
Anyways, I have a big personality and, this year, a very big life.
I like it.
I think that’s why I’ve become so protective of it.
I spent so much of my life obsessed with whether I was smart enough or talented enough or impressive enough that it feels almost ridiculous to admit that now I’m worried about something as unserious as becoming boring.
But I am.
Not boring in the sense that nobody would invite me anywhere.
I mean boring in a much more existential way.
Predictable.
Finished.
A person instead of a possibility.
More often than I like to admit, I can’t fall asleep because I am afraid that I will die in my sleep. It’s an odd thing to be hyper-fixated on, but it has really escalated over the past two years. Sometimes I get so scared that I feel physically sick, and then I begin to panic that thinking about it makes it more likely to happen.
This all probably makes me sound like a basket case, but I swear I’m bringing it up for a reason.
One night, while being an introspective basket case, I started wondering where the bedtime scaries were coming from.
Do I secretly hope to die early as a cop-out for making any real-life decisions?
Maybe I want to croak because I’m avoidant and the idea of marriage freaks me out, or because I’m going to graduate soon and seriously start a career.
Maybe some deranged little part of me wants to be memorialized as a hot, young, cool girl who had friends and weird stories and shock value.
Did I read too many YA novels as a teen?
For some reason, so many of my favorite childhood stories ended with someone dying very young. I thought it was poetic, dying with your innocence and passion intact. The tragedy was always what could have been.
The person never had time to become ordinary.
They never got old enough to make enough choices that the possibilities disappeared.
And now I am at the very edge of young adulthood where, instead of being a person full of maybes, I am slowly just becoming a person.
That is much scarier than I expected.
When you are younger, every version of your future self gets to exist at the same time. You could move anywhere. Become anything. Fall in love with anyone.
You are all potential.
Then eventually you start choosing.
You pick a career.
You pick a city.
You pick who you want around you.
Maybe you pick a person.
And every choice makes some other version of you less possible.
I think that’s what I’m actually afraid of when I wonder whether I’m cool.
Cool people seem like they might do anything next. Their lives feel slightly unpredictable. There is always another trip, another story, another person.
I don’t want to become someone whose story feels finished while I’m still living it.
Maybe that is also why I’m so conscious of how other people see me.
If enough people think I’m interesting, maybe that proves I still am.
If my friends think I’m cool, maybe I haven’t become boring.
If my pictures look good and I keep collecting strange little experiences, maybe I can keep convincing myself that there are still a million versions of me left.
And maybe there’s something a little self-important about imagining my own hypothetical early death and assuming everyone would spend years wondering what could have been.
Actually, there definitely is.
But I think there is also something very human about wanting to leave behind the most interesting version of yourself.
The version who still had somewhere to go.
The version who had not yet settled into anything.
The girl who could still become anyone.
Of course, the problem is that the only way to stay permanently full of potential is to never actually become anything.
And that would be its own kind of death.
Maybe eventually I’ll stop knowing which restaurants are cool. Maybe younger girls will look at something I love and immediately know exactly how old I am.
Worse, maybe I’ll make enough choices that people can describe me accurately.
I’ll have a career.
A home.
A routine.
People who expect me somewhere.
A life that is no longer an aesthetic or a collection of possibilities but something solid that I built.
Maybe that doesn’t mean I became boring.
Maybe it just means I stayed alive long enough to become definite.
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