okay, so we've all heard abt / seen those sephora kids, the ones who are 9-12 and go into sephora in their preppy pink crop tops and use up all the sol de janeiro and drunk elephant, stereotypically being rude to workers and making a huge mess as they do.
that's not what this chapter is about. i might touch on it--who knows, it's obviously very closely related--but this one isn't named sephora kids, which it would be, if that was my topic.
so! here's my real topic, one that is much less modern and more timeless: the real descent of childhood. the feeling of growing up too soon, or really, feeling like you are.
when i was twelve, i did not feel twelve. i felt twenty. i read things twelve-year-olds should not be reading and believed i was internally an adult, ahead of all my peers and just a genius.
i'm not a genius. that's not true. if i try hard in class, i do well, and that's the extent of my extreme crazy intelligence.
(also, since i didn't mention before: i am no longer twelve! i'm fifteen now, a sophomore in high school.)
every year since the age of twelve, and really long before, i looked back on the past and thought, 'wow, i was really young.' i looked at photos of me from a year ago and gasped in astonishment at how tiny and innocent i looked. i glanced in the mirror and thought, 'i'm nowhere near that naive now. i've had more experiences. i'm practically an adult now.'
i wasn't. i was wrong. and i will be wrong again, and again: the cycle does not end even when you acknowledge it; i still think i am older than future me will call my fifteen-year-old self. maybe that's why i'm writing this. because i don't feel like a teenager, don't feel like the child i know i still am.
i have a few examples. let's start with the clip from family guy, a popular tiktok audio you've probably heard if you're on the app. the one where stevie is asked how old he thinks his father is, and responds with his actual age, but then when realizing what the adults really wanted him to say, revises his answer to, 'daddy's old! i think he's seven!'
everyone does this. and by this, i mean underestimates the intelligence of children--although, not by as much as said children would think. a twelve-year-old is not a genius, and although obviously they all don't possess the same levels or topics of knowledge, i would say that a good portion of them, at least in today's society, know stuff about the world. they've heard about politics. they know what's going on in palestine. they are not stupid.
the other two examples i'm using are both of actual twelve-year-olds (obviously not gonna say their names or users). the first is a girl on tiktok, one of those kids with maybe ten followers who posts random little things with a blurry camera that aren't really going anywhere, but she's ten, so it's okay, you can tell she tried.
she posts things that follow the main trends, as most people do. but then she also posts videos with captions that don't suit a girl who just started the sixth grade--an example being the sort of thing that highlights today's dating culture. one of her captions was 'me as soon as i get with smn'.
which, obviously, if you are dating at that age, there's nothing i can do about that and it's your life. but! there should not be a pressure to be dating at that age. there should not be an expectation, or even a standard of coolness, to be posting those sort of 'girly-girl hahaha' things that young.
it might be part of the distortion of our own human vision. i will say that when i was twelve, i did not see myself as young, just normal. fifteen year olds looked very old, like i'd never be that old, but look where we are now, right? i didn't look in the mirror and think, 'other people will perceive me as different, as younger.'
i bet it's the same for her. tiktok is not a community meant for young children; not at all. scrolling through it, you won't get videos of girls her age, and you're not supposed to, either. what you will get is videos of beautiful high school girls with their funny captions and perfectly-curled hair, the type of person every little girl dreams of being someday.
i don't really know what to say about this topic, honestly. because yes, she's just being herself, she is posting what she wants and more often what she sees and what reason could i have to make fun of her for that, to tease her based on her own distorted views, the same distortion i have in my own line of sight? but also, she's not the only one, by far. there's another tiktok account i found, this one instead a little boy of about the same age, who makes the same sort of videos. he posts with the sequence a young adult attempting to go viral would, but his camera is blurry and his movements (he's a dancer) aren't quite as fluid or stiff but, in the childlike way that everyone thinks in at some point, his posts align perfectly with this hypothetical older dancer man i can tell he wants to be.
the example on this website that i'm only writing about with the assumption that if anyone actually managed to read down to this point (almost 1,000 words already), it probably wouldn't be this person who i've never spoken to or any of their friends.
so basically, they posted showing off their plushies, the title being 'ma plushies,' a term that is already very childish, using 'ma' instead of 'my', which was originally invented to mimic the way we speak to children--similar to 'pwease' and such.
the first sentence in this post was 'so don't call me childish, but here's my five plushies,' or something along those lines. the thing is, i wasn't going to call you childish, and i doubt anyone was, mystery girl. it's normal to own stuffed animals, even more so when you use the word 'plushies' to describe them, which is notably a more mature word--in the sense of age, not real mental maturity, as it is still used by many adults trying to appear younger.
she showed a few pictures of these said plushies, described them a little bit, and then i scrolled down, expecting a girl maybe around my age since she'd previously expressed she didn't like being called childish and i can totally relate--and boom, this girl was twelve. her friend commented confirming it, the exact age.
what is there to be embarrassed about owning stuffed animals at the ripe old age of twelve? it's not odd, or abnormal even, especially because there are manyyyy people on this site who are also twelve. no one is going to ridicule you or even think different of you for owning a stuffed animal. they're cute. i have some too. the pillow i sleep on at night is a squishmallow. does that make me childish and weird? i think it just makes me comfortable.
anyways! i would like to restate that this chapter is in no way meant to make fun of or tease any of these examples or other people acting in this manner, it's a canon event everyone's gonna go through it at some point. i know i did.
thanks for reading this absurdly long yapping session abt my opinions! hope you enjoyed <3
