This One's for the Elder Millennial Oldest Daughters

it is time to address My People

Photo by Mark Tegethoff on Unsplash

Elder Millennial Oldest Daughters, I invoke thee!

Let’s all live our best life and watch The Craft and then go drink a 40 behind some bleachers and howl at the moon. Does this mean we can smoke cigarettes again? Yay! You can pick out the CD we listen to on the way.

I’m not the only one telling the witches to gather.

We share a special bond, because we were teenagers in the 90s and were treated to a whiplash buffet of the most hope and possibility America had to offer, followed immediately by its inexorable decline. We are all deeply, irrevocably fucked up because of it. But we had some good things, like coming of age at the same time Fiona Apple launched her career and being promised a woman president would happen in our lifetime. LOL. At least we still have Fiona.

We had adult responsibilities younger than we should have. You were likely charged with the caregiving of your younger siblings, cousins, or neighbors. Later on, you’d maybe get paid a few bucks an hour and get told it was a job. A job that literally no male relative or neighbor did, nor would anyone think of asking them to do. Maybe it was you who went to buy milk for the house when your mom was too hungover to do it, or maybe it was you who regulated the emotions of everyone else in your home when your parents were screaming at each other again. Maybe it was you giving advice to the adults while you plastered on a smile and some Wet n’Wild lipstick and fought for your life in school. And you did what was expected of you, even when it was too much.

And now, you’re 40-something. You did everything that was asked of you, and you still feel like you’re juggling swords. And no matter what, just when things seem quiet, you are handed a shit sandwich of a situation and asked to fix it. Because that’s what you’ve always done. The place where you end and everyone else begins is so blurry and nebulous that you feel like you are a spectre in your own existence- everyone looking at you, expecting something from you, but never actually seeing you. A lifetime of that, over and over.

You tried not to fall apart. Maybe you wound up in an outpatient treatment program and still showed up for work anyway. Maybe you struggled with an undiagnosed illness or condition for years, but people just thought you were being dramatic, so you dragged yourself out of bed and did what you had to do until your body and mind simply couldn’t. No matter what though, everyone around you was allowed to fall apart, so long as you showed up with a broom and a dustpan. When you fall apart? Now you have to clean up your mess and theirs.

After all, your inevitable breakdown was a massive inconvenience for everyone else.

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And now, here we are. How we have wailed and raged against all of this. How many things did you see for what they were but had to keep on striving, had to keep on earning, had to keep on keeping on, because the world said you were weird and wrong? Did it turn out you were neurodivergent? Yeah, me too. And sure, you were sometimes a little annoying and always a lot weird, but you were also right. Does that burn the shit out of your biscuits, cause hoo boy, it burns mine.

It’s a crew of Cassandras. We have lost friends and lost hair and lost sanity trying to tell people what we saw coming, what we knew would happen. I know people like to make fun of us now for using the term “Cassandra”. Guess it doesn’t sound as proud of itself as shitlib or wine mom or Try Hard or whatever terms they want to throw at us for begging them to vote for the Mean Email Lady or the Lady Who Laughs Too Much. Any Woman but That Woman, which is all of them as it turns out.

Do not confuse foresight with being a good person. Some among us saw the same things we did, saw the same outcomes, but chose the path of The Shitty. I was surprised just how many, to be honest. But I try to find some understanding of our shitty sisters, because as we have seen, it is far easier to be shitty in this world, and it offers the promise of rewards. What they don’t understand is that only men are truly rewarded for being shitty. Shitty men just keep on winning. They lie and tell the shitty women that they are winning too, but make no mistake, they are not.

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Tomorrow morning, the sun will come up and the awfulness of the day will pounce on us like a starving wildcat. I implore you to stop doing. Stop fixing. Just for now, we lay down our swords and retreat. I don’t want you to watch the news. I don’t want you to read the Discourse. I don’t want you to give That Guy two seconds of your precious attention. He does not deserve or warrant it. Tuesday will be another day, and we will deal with it then.

In some ways, you have dealt with it. You have seen this coming for an unbearable amount of time. You fought against it every way you could, in whatever way you could. Like me, you will think of all the ways you failed. You will examine that from every single angle and berate yourself for it. All I can tell you is I’ve realized something - not everyone thinks like this. Like, at all. There are millions of people with no internal monologue, a fact that blows my mind every day. Can you imagine?

We saw it coming, we did what we could, and now we have to take care of ourselves. So many horrible things are going to happen, and we all know what they could be, and I promise that while it may be awful, it will not be incomprehensible. You will understand all too well, and you will understand a little faster, especially if you are blessed with MENSA level pattern recognition but are also fighting off a meltdown because this shit is stressful and your shirt tag is too itchy.

I am not saying we don’t fight. Of course we do. We have all fought like hell to build some sort of life for ourselves, and we will do that now, even though we have to contend with this flaming bag of dystopian shit that’s been left at our doorstep.

But we don’t have to do that tomorrow.

I’ll see you on the other side.