The melodrama of youth – it’s a feeling I know all too well. By Victorian standards, I’m positively hysterical. I’m always in motion, oscillating between extremes, feeling everything with the volume dialled to the max. I overreact, I’m emotional, but I’m a teenage girl. This is all meant to be normal, right?
I’ve always tied my melodramatic tendencies to the suffix of my age, pointing desperately at the “-teen” that’s accompanied me for the last seven years, using it to excuse what I’ve always taken as being a weakness. I can blame my weepiness on my age, absolving myself of any shame, any guilt.
The sad girl trope is so deeply embedded in our society. It’s ever present in the media – the archetype sad teen, the angst of adolescence. It’s normal, romanticised, expected. Those years were synonymous with pain for me, but it didn’t seem out of the ordinary. It was always just a phase, raging and changing hormones – things would get better, I was promised. I turn twenty soon, and as I watch the identifier ‘teenager’ become closer and closer to existing just in my past, I’m left calling out after it, asking why the pain isn’t leaving with the label, why it isn’t taking the hurt with it. For a long time, sadness was a survival skill, a safe and constant state. It protected me. It was horrific, but it was all I had. Sadness became a label.
In the cliques of secondary school society, I was the girl crying in the toilets, or quietly in the back of class. That was where I fit in, like I’d just stumbled out the pages of a John Green novel. But that was a long time ago, and I’m ready for new identifiers, to be seen as kind, or funny – I’ll even take being an annoyance if it means I can leave behind the ‘depressed girl’ epithets. I wonder if I would have received more support, if things could’ve been easier, if the sad teen girl trope hadn’t been so widely accepted and normalised. I think back to that small, scared, and lonely girl and want to hug her. She was so sad, all the time, and had no idea why. Instead of help, or guidance, she was told it was normal. Hormones make everyone feel like this, teen girls are allowed a depressive stage, it’s glamorous. Eat less, hate yourself, go crazy.
This isn’t to act as some grand bid for sympathy, or to declare how awful my experiences were. Compared to a lot of people, I was so privileged to have the support I did, if not from the people who were meant to help, then from a few well chosen friends, teachers, and a cat-shaped soulmate. That doesn’t mean I can’t be angry. My world constantly felt like it was ending, but biologically, things looked fine. I saw the way professionals looked at me. Why was I being so dramatic? So weak? I needed to get a grip, it was normal to feel like this. Everyone else seemed to cope, why couldn’t I?
Anyone who knew me at the time can vouch, I’m sure, for the fact that my last few years of secondary school were a new level of low for me. In the lead up to GCSEs, I was at my peak melodrama: my skin felt only one layer thick, everything burned so brightly, and hurt so much. The exams, the social politics – it was all pressing against me like a knife, my skin ready to break, to bleed. However, through the pain, it was at this time I was first shown how to view my sensitivity not as some fatal flaw, but instead as something I ought to accept.
After a particularly bad breakdown in the toilets of the English block, I was intercepted by my teacher. Despite my protests of being “fiiiiiiine” I was led to her classroom. After some rather embarrassing self-deprecating apologies, lamenting my propensity for teariness and inability to deal with the feelings experienced by most teenage girls, she just smiled, and said “You’re allowed a bit of melodrama, we’re English scholars – it comes with the territory.” In that room, I wasn’t some overreacting teenage girl, a sad sixteen year old, expected to get over it. I was justified in my melodrama, I could feel deeply and express it. It was legitimised, and the academic validation didn’t hurt.
She handed me a chocolate bar and a pack of tissues, then let me spend the next half an hour chatting about Macbeth and mentally preparing myself for an afternoon of physics. For the first time, my pain wasn’t met with dismissal. She knew nothing of what was happening in my head, but saw a young girl in pain, and justified my reaction without falling on the same old caveat of youth. Not only did she foresee my ultimate fate as an English student, but she gave me a blanket reassurance that whatever I was feeling, it was never too much.
Blame internalised misogyny, or maybe a more general societal view on emotions, but I always saw how emotional I was as a weakness. I’m the kind of person that cries at every movie she watches, the books she reads, or at the overwhelming love she feels for her cat. But there must be an upside, somewhere, deep deep down. Why was I ever made to feel like this was weak? I find beauty, meaning, in everything I see. Surely this is powerful? I’ve been trying more recently to find strength in this sensitivity, to reclaim my melodrama. Admittedly this can be hard – especially when your entire college library has seen you sobbing because you thought you could handle listening to the new Lucy Dacus album whilst writing your coursework.
I’ve been trying to take it as a positive, to embrace how emotional I am. To understand and work with my body and brain, letting the thinness of my skin show me not just how cold the world can be, but also how bright the sunlight is too. Instead of suppressing my emotions, or trying on stoicism, I’ve been practicing authenticity. Things in the world hurt, and are sad. To notice this isn’t a failure. My emotions make me more empathetic, give me a strong sense of justice. And after all, I’m an English student: I need at least some melodrama to fuel my essays.