Hello. My name is Lucy and I am a teenage girl. I’ve had 4 years to get used to this fact, but it seems as if the rest of the world hasn’t.
A recent tweet from producer and writer Judd Apatow, in response to Donald Trump, a man who has used his time in the White House so far to isolate and segregate those who do not fit into his ideal America, saw him compare the President to “a fourteen year old girl”.
I’d like you to think back to when you were a teenager. Our reality is: we live in a society where house prices are likely to always be out of reach, where tuition fees are rising, where we have to work harder than our parents in order to achieve less. All the while, we must study for exams, dealing with pressure heaped on by the education system, and work on our “employability” skills if we are to be in with the chance of acquiring a job in the future. Let’s not even go into the acne problems…
At fourteen, I was running a successful blog, stood on stage at a sold-out event at one of the UK’s major literary festivals, and started a Twitter chat which regularly trends nationally in the UK. Guess what? I tweeted like a fourteen-year-old girl.
17-year-old Amandla Stenberg is quickly becoming one of the biggest talents in Hollywood, perhaps best known for her role in The Hunger Games, but also as a Black Lives Matter and intersectional feminism activist. Malala Yousafzai, the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate, is one of the most famous teenagers in the world, after being shot for daring to speak out about girls’ rights to education. They are only two names from the millions of teenage girls living in the world right this second.
Being a teenage girl is not an insult. It’s a massive compliment. Watch as we take over the world, one tweet at a time. We are the next doctors, lawyers, journalists, caregivers, world leaders. We are the future.
#CallMeATeenager