IT HAPPENED TO ME: I am now supposed to be the adult in the room

I’m not cute no more. I growed out of it just like when I growed out of my favorite Reptar jammies. —Chuckie Finster

There are a lot of helpful things I’ve learned over the years, but one thing is so helpful I use it almost every day: Two things can be true at once.

You can love your job and also feel burnout. You can be a cat person and a dog person. You can make steps toward building a more sustainable environment and feel a bit of you die inside when the paper straw disintegrates as soon as you take your first sip. And you can be old and young.

Because I’m a Blockbuster-card-carrying, Garden-State-soundtrack-listening, unprecedented-times-living millennial. And I feel like more of an incongruence than I was in seventh grade. Which, I mean, you didn’t know me then (maybe), but just know that it’s saying a lot. Trust me.

Millennial is invoked pejoratively by every group except millennials ourselves (and sometimes not even us, because self-loathing is a shared experience among our generation AND WE’RE WORKING ON IT OKAY). Middle schoolers use it as a catch-all for the perpetually uncool, try-hard, cringe folks that are their parents’ age which, okay, fair. GenX and up still think we’re teenagers, apparently, if the grainy memes on my occasional trips to my Facebook feed are any indication. (Fact check: we actually do know how to read and write in cursive, we did not ever eat Tide Pods, but bless you for thinking we’re still teenagers. Lord knows I’d like some of that skin elasticity right now.)

My fellow millennials have either hit forty or we’re teetering dangerously close to it. Our backs hurt. We have to make up for killing our pores with Noxema pads and St. Ives apricot scrubbing by embracing multi-step skincare that costs about the same as a car payment. The Challenger exploded when I was three weeks old, and I’ve been living in Unprecedented Times ever since.

There’s something lovely and freeing since I turned forty this year, though. I have learned to embrace the things that make me weird—all that cringe behavior that gets eyerolls from my children and would have earned me a sneering look in high school from the cool kids’ table—and let it fly. I’ll use the gif reaction. I’ll send texts longer than three or four words (which I’ve now learned is apparently a super millennial thing to do?). I’ll wear the clothes I want to wear, read the books I want to read, and I’ll enjoy it even if I’m the only one having fun. “Weird” hits even deeper after forty than it ever did when I was eleven and listening to it through my boom box and gazing at my multiple posters of Taylor Hanson on my walls.

I read somewhere recently (and by “read somewhere” I mean “it was a caption on an Instagram post I think”) that being in your forties means getting to be the person you wanted to be at fifteen, only this time, you’re not apologizing for it or minimizing it. I’ve leaned into that in recent months, and I’ve got to tell you, my soul has never felt lighter.

My fellow millennials, our whole lives can be summed up in the two things can be true at the same time truism. We can feel our age when we get out of bed and we can wear cute clothes. We can crash out over Italian brainrot and we can still go bar for bar on the End Of The World flash video from eBaum’s World. We can run tech support for our kids when they don’t know how to connect to the router and we can run tech support for our parents when they don’t know how to find that PDF they saved. We can embrace a firm “I will not be leaving my house after nightfall” policy and we remember what to do when we hear that Cash Money Records Taking Over For The Nine-Nine Into Two Thousand. We can be emotionally exhausted at the state of the Everything Going On All The Time and still have hope that it won’t always be this way.

We can be old and we can be young. Let’s make like Hannah Montana and get the best of both worlds.