The Mess of Millennial Womanhood and the Myth of ‘Having It All’

A week before my thirtieth birthday, I met a friend for lunch in the LA enclave of Atwater Village. It was a busy Sunday and Glendale Boulevard was clogged with two-decker strollers carting apathetic toddlers and equipped with everything from phone chargers to a mini-libraries. White women ran to and from yoga in $200 stretchy pants, and young professionals in sweatsuits dictated their next business ventures to Siri, lattes in hand. I pressed my forehead to the restaurant’s glass window, which only magnified the buzz of five-year plans and speculative property value from the conversations being had around me.

This deluge of personal and professional efficiency was too much accomplishment for my already-wounded ego. The year leading up to my thirtieth birthday, I couldn’t sleep. Even under the strong arm of melatonin, I woke up alone night after night in the garage apartment I rented from my mother riddled with anxiety. It could be rippled by the slightest event—a magazine rejection, a friend’s engagement, a peer’s promotion. After leaving a career in the nonprofit sector to pursue writing, my life did not look the way I thought it would at my age. As I tried to balance grad school with freelance jobs and a decades-long relationship, I found myself wrestling with a fear that my hourglass was running out.

Millennial women are told we can have it all by our thirtieth birthdays if we take the right steps: We can make calculated dating decisions with the help of feminist-branded apps, get married and pregnant in less than a year, then strap our newborns onto our stomachs and take brisk jogs around our local metropolitan parks before heading off to equitable jobs nestled in looming high-rises. Of course, the idea of this kind of diabolical accomplishment is also rooted in class; it assumes you had parents who lived in a favorable zip code, could afford every SAT prep class and music lesson and boast the free time to take you to basketball practice. Most of the time, it means that you had the generational wealth to keep you afloat during unpaid internships or that weird gap year you took in Japan, the one you wrote your internship application about.

This ability for millennial women to “have it all” is directly contradicted by history. According to The Lily, the average wealth of millennials in their early thirties ($140,600) is significantly less than that of our Gen X ($152,000) and baby boomer ($221,100) counterparts. This gap only widens for women of color. An Atlantic article on millennials and gender maintains that millennial women are “looking not for a balance between work and life as much a blend—work being a part of it, raising a family being another part of it—and organizing it so it all happens in a way that is not harried.” I see danger even in this “blend” and the looming phantom of burnout.

At the close of my third decade, I could barely pay my minimal rent to my mother. I sat further away from the assumed milestones of adulthood at thirty than I had at twenty. And even if I wanted to hit them, these kinds of market-driven accomplishments sounded both exhausting and toxic. Outside the Atwater Village restaurant, I watched a blonde woman in a boho top swaddle her baby in Guatemalan print and press the child to her chest as she murmured into the iPhone cradled between her manicured fingers. I turned to my friend and asked, “What if I don’t want it all?”

Millennial women are told we can have it all by our thirtieth birthdays if we take the right steps.

That’s around the time I started listening to the band HAIM. I’d put them on anytime—in the car driving down the subdued clutter of Alvarado Boulevard late at night, window down, waiting for other drivers to lock eyes with me at red lights, or in my headphones, roaming the deserted produce aisle of Ralphs, fingers grazing the immaculate, unpunctured skins of hothouse tomatoes.

HAIM is comprised of sisters Danielle, Este, and Alana Haim, and their album Women in Music Part III revels in their right not to choose, to be dissatisfied and to want less. The album zeroes in on avoidant lovers, depressive afternoons in bed, career ambivalence. Its title suggests something fractured and iterative about the condition of being a woman—that we don’t have to arrive at our personhoods whole, but, rather, becoming a self happens in stages. Instead of the smooth, linear operation of the late-capitalist-accomplishment machine, HAIM’s album title suggests that women can come to themselves in bits and pieces.

Each song on the album pieces together the life of millennial women. “I Know Alone” speaks to the seeming singularity of a universal feeling like loneliness. The song’s speaker insists that though the rooms she sleeps in are different, her dreams are the same. “I know alone, and I don’t want to talk about it,” Danielle sings, suggesting a sinister agency in maintaining, and therefore owning, one’s own wretched state. I felt the weight of gendered, socially prescribed assumptions in my chest when Danielle sang, “Then Sunday comes and they expect me to shine.” Songs like “Gasonline,” “3AM,” and “I Don’t Wanna” graft the breadth and unruliness of female sexuality, ranging from the turbo-erotic to the pleading. In many ways, it’s an album that refuses to make up its mind—on love, on expectations, on its own affect. In a series of music videos directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the sisters glide through LA dive bars and diners, movie theaters and car washes, shedding T-shirts, evening gowns, and work uniforms. Even the album’s production style is stubbornly undecided, hopping from alternative rock to hymnal to the reggae-inspired undertow of the song “Another Try.”

This was the album I needed in a tumultuous year. A friend presented it to me as medicine during a time in my life that offered more questions than answers. Three months into the pandemic, I blew up my life. I split up with my partner of eight years over the course of a thirty-second phone call. I’d met him when he was thirty-one and I was twenty-two, hungry for connection and reeling from family tragedy. While his coming-of-age references were ’90s hip-hop, mine were the Backstreet Boys and Destiny’s Child. Ignoring the Freudian nature of our entanglement, I dived headfirst, accepting the labels of girlfriend, then, later, fiancée, without really understanding what they meant, what I wanted them to mean for me.

When we met I was recently graduated, cobbling together income in the rapidly techifying mid-2010s Bay Area, and trying to be loved in the process. I had left college with degrees in Spanish literature and ethnic studies and a burning obsession with being “good.” I had spent years theorizing morality in society, reading about the evils of capitalism. I was sick of the talking, the typing in circles about the right way to be in the world. I wanted to do.

By twenty-five, I clawed my way into my first full-time job. I worked at a women-led urban planning nonprofit whose vision aligned with mine, but the job and pay were unsustainable. Next, my partner and I were engaged by my twenty-seventh birthday. In many ways, I’d checked off the boxes. Yet inside the relationship there were silences, then explosive fights. Every conflict felt like a setback, but I was committed to a linear life, so I ignored the warning signs for the sake of a nebulous future, kicking the realities of the present down the road.

In the end, I couldn’t stomach the “blend”; I burned out from each job I secured in less than two years. The more time and energy I gave, the more these organizations wanted. Feeling like I’d run out of options after working in nonprofits for almost a decade, I gave up my cobbled-together career to go to graduate school. Not too soon after, I ended my long-term relationship; an argument over Covid safety brought to light the underlying issues of safety and trust that had riddled our partnership for years. We’d moved across the country twice together. I’d given my twenties to the union, signed both of our names to car sales and apartment leases. Within a matter of days, he was out of my life for good. Unwittingly, I had dropped all the conventions of millennial womanhood one by one.

In these upside-down days, I googled HAIM’s 2020 music video for “The Steps” on a whim, slumped underneath my covers past midnight one evening. Seconds into viewing, I was already located; I watched HAIM’s lead singer Danielle rise from a messy bed, clad in white tank and granny panties. She brushes her teeth, foam sudsing over her lips. Mid-brush, she rings her mouth with lipstick. There was something validating in her methodology of making a mess. It was a vile and decadent move. I loved the blatant chaos of the way she wiped her bright red lipstick off with her white shirt and spit on the bathroom mirror, making drawings with the red-tinged saliva. It felt like she was owning her own disorder, turning it into play, into art.

Watching the Haim sisters ragefully forage through piles of dirty clothes, don oversized sports jackets and sloppily apply makeup just to get back into bed, felt like a metaphor for how I was feeling—shedding identities like clothes of the day, coming back to myself in bits and pieces. ​​After the split, I wandered my mother’s house like a ghost, flitting from my computer to my bed, barely eating, overwatering my two house plants. I felt immense relief but also grief, not just for the loss of this person’s presence, but the loss of the kind of life I was supposed to strive for. The kind of life tied up neatly in a bow—a progressive life, an A to B to C life. By breaking up with my former partner and by leaving my career, I’d scratched the timeline. It was freeing to let it go, to construct something else completely. But also scary, unknown, dark. This monumental split also brought to light a bedrock of trauma that I had not yet addressed, namely childhood sexual and emotional abuse, which solidified into chronic anxiety and codependency. But the fallacy of “right” adulthood temporarily shielded me from looking at all that.

Unwittingly, I had dropped all the conventions of millennial womanhood one by one.

Watching “The Steps,” I recognized the apartment too—the cheap clapboard and sliding mirror wardrobes of any Valley apartment complex, the milky light of a smoggy morning pouring through slat blinds. LA’s slapdash nature is the perfect setting for this kind of personal reckoning. I had moved to Portland by then. Out of the blue, an offer to teach at an art college in Portland had fallen into my inbox. I made endless sad-girl playlists and stalked the tree-lined streets, looping around and around nearby Kenton Park in an electric strawberry puffer, crunching iced grass under my Doc Martens as I attempted to make sense of my teenage-sized emotions.

In Portland, I taught online art history and writing classes from my bedroom, my students reduced to one-inch-by-one-inch squares. But even there, in the reduction of the digital, my students’ generosity came through. I propped them against a small metal side table and tried to sit with some kind of dignity in the rocking chair that dominated the small room I rented. In my class on writing and the family archive, we poured over Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Even from the bleak rectangles of our laptop screens, we were able to probe how art and literature can shape reality. I am grateful for this reminder of life’s expansiveness, for this sense of homecoming through creative and intellectual kin. In my Latinx Subcultures class, I rocked in my chair and listened to the voices of my students talk about Laura Aguilar and José Esteban Muñoz and Christina Fernandez and Vaginal Davis, and I felt soothed. Teaching was a place where I could be calm and thoughtful. Offline, I was erratic, a thirty-something going on twenty-something, my feet curled under myself on the couch as I cackled with my friend about sex, dancing on the gray slate of my kitchen, crying under the surly glow of my room’s single lightbulb, frantically writing every thought and feeling to get to the bottom of a seemingly never-ending loneliness. But online, staring into that bingo board of sweet, attentive, virtual faces, came the balm to that loneliness that did not need to come from a partner.

In my reckoning year, I wanted no one and everyone. I sat in my empty apartment alone, wearing newly bought lingerie underneath a fur coat as I ate Lucky Charms out of a mug and pressed replay on “The Steps” video, watching Danielle Haim stalk through that house again and again, nipples blazing in a white undershirt, her deadpan face singing into the mirror about a lover who doesn’t understand her. My year had yielded one short-lived yet electrifying rebound relationship, which ended as quickly as it began. And when it ended, I couldn’t quite figure out what I was upset about—the potential partner or the framing they provided. Instead of answering, I hit replay on the video again, slurping up my pink milk. On the phone, Danielle sang presumably to the lover, that “if you go left and I go right, baby, that’s just life sometimes.” She surrendered to the mess, and to the possibility of loss, and when I watched her I felt like I had some semblance of kinship, if no answer. In the following weeks, I walked for hours, wanting to be alone yet utterly surrounded, searching the streets for something I knew I wouldn’t find. I couldn’t write; I drew pictures for no reason. I learned the joy of purposelessness.

“The Steps” video is also about literally coming face-to-face with one’s imperfections. The Haim sisters are tired and audaciously irritable, one of them falling headfirst into a pool, one clambering onto the sink in nylons to splash water onto her head from the faucet, one smearing her newly applied lipstick and spitting it onto the mirror. In the midst of reclaiming myself, I started to avoid the mirror, not wanting to see my puffy eyes and wild unwashed hair. “The Steps” video embraces the mirror. The sisters’ taking off and putting on of lipstick felt like a form of permission. Some days I dressed in leather and felt gorgeous, powerful, capable of taking on the world. Others I wilted underneath an oversized knit hoodie, furiously writing and feeling unattractive and out of control. I tried everything to stabilize; I kept an affirmations journal, an ugly-feelings journal, a journal of nude portraits to convince myself that I was still hot. I did inner-child work. I talked to my therapist. I talked to a women’s support group. I decided talking wasn’t the thing, so I started to draw. I bought a hundred dollars’ worth of art supplies. I cleaned my floors. I tried to be all the women I could have been over the past ten years all at once. It felt disordered and childish, but now I see this disorder as a necessary step in rediscovering that the world is painful and scary and brilliant. These pandemic years have been ones of stepping into my power by breaking down, by relinquishing control just to redefine it again. By deciding what my life looks like and choosing who gets to be in it. In the wake of letting go of that relationship, I got back to myself.

This acceptance of uncertainty is not without immense fear. Nonlinear time can feel alarming, chaotic. HAIM’s “The Steps” reflects this feeling, this chaos. The video emulates the stitching and unstitching of life that happened in my thirties—the confrontations with loneliness, depression, lust. But the video also assured me that the chaos is manageable, natural even. My twenties were a cut-and-paste collage of what I thought my life should look like. My thirties are elastic, malleable, uncharted. I’m coming face-to-face with myself in the mirror—dark circles, unabashed nipples, and all. I put on lipstick. I take it off. I put on lipstick just to take it off.

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