Livin' My Middle School Dream

Sometimes I wonder if adulthood is really just an elaborate attempt to rewrite the narratives we inherited before we had language for them.

A reclamation project disguised as career, taste, and identity.

When I think back to middle school, what I remember most is feeling powerless.

I had strict parents, no money of my own, and zero agency over what I wanted or who I could become.

So I built another world, the only way I knew how.

I’d race home after school, drop my backpack, and disappear into YouTube.

Tutorials, haul videos, vanity tours — older girls who’d show the camera their beautiful bedrooms, overflowing with makeup collections and clothes I would never be allowed to wear.

I didn’t grow up in a household where you could casually buy the thing you wanted just because. So I watched…just to imagine. It was both escapism and prophecy.

‘Cause fast-forward, and now I quite literally exist inside the world I used to observe through the screen.

Working in beauty is my full-time job.
Products arrive at my door unsolicited.
My shelves are full of serums, palettes, denim…all the things I once admired from afar.

And somewhere along the way, I picked up a reflex: I purchase things I really want simply because I can, because once upon a time, there was a girl inside me who never could.

I don’t want to deny her anymore.

But here’s the complexity I’m only now learning to sit with:

Sometimes the longing I’m appeasing isn’t mine. It belongs to the twelve-year-old version of me, still aching for agency, still convinced that ownership equates to more than it really does.

There’s something profoundly healing about giving little me what she never had — the indulgence, the abundance. But there’s also a shadow side. When “treating myself” is just soothing a memory. Appeasing a ghost.

Growing up means asking: Do I actually want this now? Or does the little girl who lacked still need proof she matters?

I think I’m suspended between the two — still tending to her, responding to her lack, but also learning to ask the harder question:

Where does honoring the inner child end, and where does becoming the adult I am now begin?

Maybe living your middle school dream isn’t just about accumulation.

The truth is, I’m living the life she could only envision. But the more tender work, the more adult work, is ensuring that I don’t merely inhabit her fantasy, but grow beyond it.

I gave her the life she longed for.

Now I need to find out what I long for.

*Cover image is AI generated