🌟 One in a Millennial 🌟 Review
“You’re such a millennial,” a friend told me derisively, as we stood at a crowded bar in the Hamptons.
I was 32 at the time, hanging out with an older, “cooler” crew. As an only child born to older parents, I’ve spent much of my life being surrounded by people older than me, trying to be taken seriously. I thought I’d been doing a good job of it, so my friend’s comment stung.
This was 2015, and you did not want to be called a millennial. To be called a millennial meant that you were entitled, lazy, etc. At 32, when many of my friends were getting married and starting to have kids, I already felt “behind,” and my cheeks burned with shame as I choked down another espresso martini*.
Iliza Shlesinger released her Elder Millennial comedy special in 2018, when she and I (she is two weeks younger than me!) were 35, and I started embracing the term a little more, as she began making it acceptable.
“For most of my early life, I felt like an amalgam of the people, pop culture and zeitgeist around me, forgoing the discomfort of forging my own identity and instead burying it in other people’s whose coolness had already been preapproved by society. I would take cues from popular media and popular kids in school to curate a version of me that was not defined by what I liked, but by finding ways to get people to like me.”
This is from page 4 of One in a Millennial by Kate Kennedy (of Be There in Five!), and as soon as I read that, I said “fuuuuuuck” to myself and threw the book down, feeling all too seen. I struggled to come up with a transition from talking about Iliza to talking about Kate, knowing that framing my acceptance of my place within my generation is even characteristically marked by others deeming it OK.
Reading this book was incredibly therapeutic to me, and I vacillated between wanting to consume it as slowly as possible, never wanting it to end, and dying to stay up late to see where else I’d identify myself within its pages.
The thing I’ve always loved about her podcast is how she makes you feel less alone in so many ways: whether it’s as “company” in your ears as you’re doing errands, walking, running, etc; whether it’s embracing your passions, no matter how deep or superficial they are; whether it’s to remind you that you are not alone in feeling alone.
And of course, her book is no different. Her tales of the boys who would flirt with her on AIM but not give her the time of day in school brought up painful memories from a situation with a guy in high school that I’ve carried so much shame over for all those years; that I desirable to hook up with or to digitally flirt with, but who didn’t deserve the time of day in public.
“It’s common,” Kate writes about the embarrassing friends-with-benefits situations that weren’t entirely mutual, “but that doesn’t make it individually any less gut-wrenching.”
And her talking about the Limited Too, Abercrombie and all the brands of our youth that we thought defined us bring back sweet memories of shopping with my mom and feeling so excited to wear those new clothes to school.
Her central thesis is WE NEVER STOOD A CHANCE. With abstinence-only sex education juxtaposed with sexualized media being just one of the many paradoxes millennials grew up with, in a world that changed dramatically as we were becoming adults, no wonder we’re all in therapy.
Speaking of mental health, one of the [many] things I love about Kate is how she openly addresses mental health and talks about her own experience with depression.
I saw her live show last night, and she ended with this, which I will end with, too:
“I don’t have the answers, but the power is in talking about it.”
*Yes, I do feel inclined to point out that I was drinking espresso martinis long before they became cool and then “cheugy” again. (And yes, I do also know they were trendy in the 90s too.)