Limited Edition Girlhood, Just Dropped

By Upama Bhattacharjee

At the age of eighteen, I have successfully rebranded myself five times. Which is a lot, if you ask any sane business owner. I was the smart girl, then the sad girl, then the manic pixie dream burnout, then the girl who only posts weirdly angled dimly lit sunsets, and now—drumroll—I’m simply a concept. A vibe. A ghost with a skincare routine (and amazing glass skin).

My product line drops this Thursday, by the way. 10% off if you manage to get in line right now.

Somewhere around age nine, you realize you’re being watched. Not in a creepy way—unless you count society, which I do—but in a “every move you make is part of your origin story” kind of way. You smile a certain way and someone says, “You look like a Disney princess.” You scowl because some idiot pulled your hair and someone says, “Ooh, attitude!” You don’t eat the cake at your birthday party (it's not your favorite flavor, that is chocolate) and someone jokes about models. You blink wrong and it becomes personality. Everything is permanent. There's no do-over even before you realize what do-overs are.

By twelve, you’ve become a startup, a project spearheaded by your parents who are deciding what kind of girl to market you as.

By sixteen, you’re a struggling influencer.

By eighteen, you’ve been publicly soft-launched via other people’s Instagram stories at least four times. (And you giggled all four times. Don't lie.)

Girlhood, as it turns out, is less about growing up and more about optimizing your presence. We are born, we cry, we get a Canva subscription. We design the picture perfect lives that everyone else would envy.

No one warned us that it would feel like a marketing internship where the product is you, the strategy is fear, and the brand values are “effortless beauty, unbothered sadness, and light feminist rage with just enough vulnerability to be sexy but not enough to be inconvenient.” You try to change the brand values, and suddenly everyone gets mad, because girlhood is an age-old brand which has affiliations with a number of multimillionaire enterprises, namely: patriarchy, skincare and What I Eat In A Day. God forbid a woman tries to make girlhood about herself!

But I adapted, like any other good citizen of the global nation.

I learned early that if I cry quietly and tilt my head 30 degrees so that the mascara runs across my cheeks in the perfect way, someone will call me poetic. I learned that oversharing is a monetizable skill if you use lowercase and line breaks. I learned that if I frame my depression like a Pinterest board, people will send me messages like "this is so us!!!". They won't call though. Everyone knows this is all superficial. That's how it is.

I learned how to be the kind of broken that is consumable.

This is girlhood in the digital age. We are not people. We are content creators with blood. We are essayists in the captions. We are survivors of being perceived, and we turn into performers, against our will.

Sometimes I look at a sunset and I don’t even enjoy it. I just think, this will look great with my new poem about yearning. I look at my own heartbreak and think, thank god, I needed a good metaphor. I watch an obscure indie French movie that's supposed to be a classic on Letterboxd, and I go which quote should I share on my story? Pain, in the hands of a girl, becomes packaging. And everyone loves good packaging. Slap a pastel label on it, change everything to lowercase, and introduce line breaks that seem to have meaning but actually don't.

Of course, there's pressure. Being a girl is expensive. Emotionally, financially, spiritually. You have to buy your identity, then renew it monthly, like Spotify Premium (which ironically, is also something you should have. How else are you going to go on Hot Girl Walks listening to The Newest Self Development Podcast?) You have to be hot, but in a cool way. Smart, but in a palatable way. Sad, but in a hot girl way. It’s exhausting, but hey—at least my trauma has aesthetic value. Baba says I can't live off vibes, but that's just what dads are supposed to say when their little girls have a vague sense of looming existential crisis and refuse to come out of their rooms.

Sometimes I write essays like this to remind people (and myself) that I’m self-aware. You see, if I acknowledge the absurdity, I win in some pathetic, twisted way. I can’t be objectified if I do it first. I can’t be commodified if I sell myself before anyone else can. That’s feminism. (Or late-stage capitalism. But we don’t talk about that in mixed company.)

You might think I’m being dramatic. You’d be right, of course. Drama is marketable. It sells.

But have you ever tried to be a girl online?

Have you ever tried to exist as a teenage girl who has anxiety and loose skin and an Instagram account? It’s terrifying. One wrong move and you’re either “cringe” or “overrated” or “not that deep.” One genuine emotion and you’re branded attention-seeking. One joke and you’re trying too hard. Empathy and you're told cry me a river.

So you learn to brand your trauma as edgy.

You watermark your wounds. You say “haha” in lowercase when you want to scream.

You don’t just cry. You perform heartbreak. You reference Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath and that one TikTok audio about being hard to love. You cry to it when you want to be perceived, even when you're alone. You cry in front of the mirror and suck in your stomach when you see that it's not the abs those pilates coaches promised you. You cry in such an organized way that people ask you for advice on how to feel better.

They don’t want you to heal. They want you to keep leaking pain in digestible doses.

And God forbid you’re happy. Happiness doesn’t trend. Confidence is called arrogance unless it’s wrapped in self-deprecating humor. Joy is only allowed if it’s ironic. What even is funny? So you keep dancing on the edge of collapse. You put “recovering sad girl” in your bio and hope people think that means you’re brave. Or poetic. Or dateable.

There’s a part of me that still hopes someone will love me for the off-brand parts. The glitchy bits. The girl who eats too fast and laughs at her own jokes and texts “are you mad at me?” after a one-word reply. But I also know that girl doesn’t get followers. She gets blocked. Fucking creep.

So I keep curating.

Girlhood is one long audition for love you’re not sure you want. It’s checking your reflection in a shop window and wondering if you look like the kind of person who would get chosen. It’s rewriting yourself in a thousand fonts, hoping one will stick. It’s saying “I’m fine” with your mouth and “please see me” with your posts. It’s a performance you didn’t audition for but learned to master anyway.

I’m told I should be grateful. I’m a young woman in the modern world. I have options. I have voice. I can reclaim everything.

Sure. But sometimes I don’t want to reclaim anything. I want to wear my stupid boots that don't match any aesthetic at all. I just want to sit in silence without performing. I want to eat cake without guilt. I want to be messy without it becoming marketable.

But I don’t get that.

Because I’m the girl. The product. The brand.

And this essay? This is just part of the package. This is me, again, pretending that by laughing at the system, I’m not still in it. That by writing this, I’ve somehow escaped The Matrix. I haven’t.

It’s okay though. This content sells well. And oh, remember, preorder ends Wednesday!

By Upama Bhattacharjee