“All my life I’ve been obsessed with adolescence, drunk on it. Even when I was little, I knew that teenagers sparkled. I knew they knew something children didn’t know, and adults ended up forgetting.” — Lorde
There’s something eerie about realising a whole version of yourself has ended.
It's not dramatic. No big bang. Just a quiet shift — a door that closes behind you and doesn’t open again. And when you look back, it’s not with regret but with a kind of reverence — like visiting a house you used to live in. You remember the wallpaper, the way the light fell through the window, but you know you can never go back.
Teenagedom in particular feels so finite. It ends, and nothing else will happen to it. That’s the part that flattens me — not the memories, but the finality of them. No new scenes. No new photos. Just what’s already in the archive. All the imagined versions of yourself at 17 collapse into one. And there are few voices that have captured the agony and awe of that era of our lives quite like Ella Yelich-O’Connor, aka Lorde.
And while Pure Heroine, Melodrama, and Solar Power each mapped their own emotional terrains, it’s her A Note from the Desk of a Newborn Adult — a letter Lorde wrote on Facebook on the eve of her 20th birthday — that for me, most profoundly captures its essence.
"Tomorrow I turn 20, and it’s all I’ve been able to think about for days. I walk around the city, up by the park and by the health food store and down into the subway, this new age hanging in front of my eyes like two of those Mylar balloons that never come down. Can people see it, I wonder, that I’m about to cross over?"
I read Lorde’s note when I, too, had just turned 20 (we share a birth year, 1996 – The Year of the Rat). Like her, I walked through streets wondering if people could see it on me: the flicker of someone teetering between selves. A teenager no longer, but not quite an adult. That liminal age when everything feels too much and not enough, all at once. I was still clinging on to those small but seismic moments that make up adolescence – kissing strangers and parking out in the McDonalds car park late at night with your friends; the thrill of heading out to your first party and the terror of leaving home. The slow realisation that everyone is both good and bad, including you.
“All my life I’ve been obsessed with adolescence, drunk on it," Yelich-O’Connor wrote. "Even when I was little, I knew that teenagers sparkled. I knew they knew something children didn’t know, and adults ended up forgetting.”
That quote — teenagers sparkle — hit me like a gut punch. Because yes, they do. Or maybe we did. "I was 16 when most of us met. Can you believe it?," she continued. "I laugh thinking about that me now - that glossy idiot god, princess of her childhood streets, handmade and ugly and sure of herself." There was a time we knew things without knowing how we knew them. Infected by solipsism and that instinctive, giddy certainty. Before logic set in. Before self-consciousness softened everything. Before our lives and decisions became something we had to explain.
For those of us who grew up with Lorde over the last 10 years, her note still feels like a mirror. We, too, have spent years romanticising our adolescence — Tumblr-text-post-reblogging our sadness, soundtracking our nights with Ribs and Supercut and, on the worst ones, Liability. And there’s a strange relief in hearing someone else articulate that shift — the quiet terror of realising that no one has the answers, that we're all out here, floundering, together at least.
And Yelich-O’Connor isn't the only one. So many of the artists we hold close have tried, in their own way, to capture this ache — this shimmer of adolescence that feels just out of reach the moment you start growing past it. You see it in the soft melancholia of Phoebe Bridgers. In Billie Eilish’s quiet confessionals, in the lo-fi urgency of Clairo, in Frank Ocean’s polaroid-like memories of “lost love, youth, and the joy and pain of it.” All of them, knowingly or not, are sketching the same love letter to the chaos of becoming, and the dread of knowing you can’t stay there. Because getting older is scary — not just for what it means, but for what it leaves behind.
We clung to Lorde's words in particular not because her lyrics or musings offered solutions, but because they understood the ache. From Ribs –
This dream isn't feeling sweet
We're reeling through the midnight streets
And I've never felt more alone
It feels so scary getting old
Or from Perfect Places –
I hate the headlines and the weather
I'm nineteen and I'm on fire
But when we're dancing, I'm alright
It's just another graceless night
Growing up alongside her music meant having someone else excavate the same emotions we were maybe a little too young or naive to name just yet — envy, longing, displacement, hope. True to her name, her music always carried something prophetic — documenting, distilling and divining our coming-of-age in real time. "Since 13 I’ve spent my life building this giant teenage museum, mausoleum maybe," she spills in her A Note from the Desk of... letter on Facebook, "Dutifully wolfishly writing every moment down, and repeating it all back like folklore."
But when Lorde composed her now-immortalised Facebook post – one now shared, saved, and endlessly reblogged – I don't think she wasn’t trying to be profound. And maybe that’s why it was. These were just collected reflections from any other 19-year-old, untouched by performance. Just a girl penning something down so she wouldn’t forget – on Facebook of all places, the birthplace of unfiltered text posts, diaristic oversharing. And in doing so, she cemented what we're all just trying to cement: proof that it happened. That we were there. That we felt all of it.
I’ve spent the better part of my twenties doing the same. Filling dresser drawers and notebooks with the scraps of my teenage years and early 20s: concert ticket stubs, festival wrist bands, blurry Polaroids – whole cities and relationships still stuck between the songs of an old playlist on Spotify that I refuse to delete. Maybe you do too.
But the thing Lorde understood — and what I’m only beginning to — is that the sparkle doesn’t vanish. It just changes texture. Like a song you haven’t heard in years, but somehow still remember all the words to. She calls this time a “weird blissful hangover.” And I think that’s it — the ache of moving forward while looking back, of being a former version of yourself who still lives somewhere inside you.
And now, at 29, as I stand on the precipice of yet another frontier, it's hard not to feel nostalgic for the last decade the same way I did the one before. I'm on the other side of the threshold, still learning what it means to let go.
