As a young girl, I was drawn to darker subjects. I was the kind of child who watched Child’s Play at 4 and then casually asked my mom, “Is it bad to throw your mommy out the window?” I had this tendency to scowl in photographs, which was blamed on shyness by adults who didn’t want to admit I was simply weird.
But I wasn’t drawn to darkness because I was sad; I was drawn to it because I was bored. Even at 9, the sanitized world of childhood felt insultingly shallow: pink tutus, playdates with girls perfectly content with Webkinz and friendship bracelets. Maybe it was a desire to be older—or just different—to prove there was more to me to offer.
By seventh grade, I found a new guiding light in my pursuit of artificial sad girl-dom: Skins, a British teen drama about drugs and despair. It was less a TV show and more a portal opening to another dimension. I tried the character Effy Stonem’s style on for size: a haircut mimicking her choppy allure, blue eyeliner smudged into an approximation of her edgy detachment. I practiced holding a pen between my fingers like a cigarette, studying the elegant drape of her hand. I started to believe that her tragedy was glamorous and that sadness makes you visible. Suffering, I thought, was a kind of personality I could adopt. And for someone desperate to have one, I was hooked.
Thirteen, a 2003 teen drama, was even more impactful on my quest for an identity. It was a movie my older sister had forbidden me to watch until I myself was 13, as if being the same age as the characters would somehow prepare me. Evie and Tracy, played by the preternaturally cool Nikki Reed (who also cowrote the film, based on her own life) and Evan Rachel Wood, seemed impossibly older, rawer, and more dangerous than their years, bending time and age the way adolescence often does. After diving into Evie and Tracy’s universe and adopting their mannerisms, style, and disdain for society for a season, I moved on to the classic sad girl ingenues in Girl, Interrupted, and The Virgin Suicides.
For me, these weren’t just movies. They were manuals for self-destruction, rich with aestheticized despair. Effy Stonem, Evie and Tracy, the Lisbon sisters of the Virgin Suicides—they weren’t just sad. They owned sadness. It was their currency. Their armor. I wanted to be studied. I wanted boys to write songs about my depth and melancholy or at the very least stand outside my house holding up a boombox blasting “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. I wasn’t actually depressed yet, but I was determined to play it.
My Tumblr account helped me chase that goal: grainy black-and-white shots of hollow-cheeked girls smoking in bathtubs, thigh gaps carved out like sculptures. I set Kate Moss as my lock screen, a saintly reminder of restraint. Every handful of chips was a moral failing, every indulgence proof I’d never reach the waif-like perfection of those Tumblr girls or heroin-chic models who looked like they might collapse under the weight of their own misery.
It’s not that the media forces this on you. It just seeps in. It seeps until you can no longer tell where it ends and you begin. I learned sadness like a dialect, became fluent in the gestures and attitudes of girls whose pain had been edited to look trendy. But while I’d seen enough movies and shows to know what mental illness was supposed to look like, I hadn’t lived enough life to understand what it actually entailed.
My Lana/Tumblr/Effy-influenced behavior was all inconsequential until I went off to a hippie boarding school. It was junior year, the peak of what my friends and I called the “2016 Xandemic.” Xanax was everywhere and absurdly easy to get, like finding seashells on the beach. My cool older friends assured me that the real fun wasn’t just popping a Xanax bar but dissolving a quarter into your red Solo cup, drinking the mix, then watching the world around you quickly go dark. I didn’t know how to go out without waking up the next morning in a cold panic. By the time I got to college, it was more of the same. At a small Connecticut liberal arts school, students used every minor weather event as an excuse for communal hedonism. Snow days meant acid in a frat basement. The first warm afternoon meant shrooms on the quad. So I kept going, spiraling deeper into a strange, shared haze in which blacking out was the baseline and everything else was just noise.
I’d found a new way to pursue the aesthetic I’d been chasing since seventh grade. Experimenting with things that brought me closer to my ideal, troubled Effy Stonem–inspired reality. It was how I fit in and how I stood out. I smoked outside the library and clomped around in black Doc Martens while everyone else wore ballet flats. My poetry professor told me to “try writing about something happy for once.”
My boyfriend at the time saw it, too. After a forced third rewatch of Girl, Interrupted, he turned to me and said, “So this is where you get your personality from?” He wasn’t wrong. I’d built my entire identity on a foundation of misery that was plagiarized, cobbled together from a dozen different sources. It’s not that I wasn’t actually sad. There was something real there, buried under all the layers of artifice. But I’d borrowed so much of my misery from other people that I’d lost track of which parts were mine. I was stuck in the brand I had created for myself: the tragic girl, the ethereal one, the one who felt more deeply than everyone else. It gave me a way to feel special in a world where I didn’t yet know how to be myself. To let it go would’ve meant admitting I had no idea who I was without the costume. That the darkness I’d curated so carefully wasn’t depth at all—it was fear.
The second semester of my freshman year, I met Katherine, who was essentially Grace Kelly–gorgeous and glowing with positivity. At the time, that kind of happiness seemed shallow to me, something people faked to avoid confronting life’s darker truths. Her optimism made me suspicious. Who could be that happy all the time without performing? Didn’t she know the world was a terrible place?
And yet, we became best friends. Slowly, inevitably. The way proximity sometimes forces you to. I realized what I’d dismissed as superficial was far more authentic than anything I was cosplaying. Katherine, who grew up in a large, athletic New England family, was kind and pragmatic and didn’t suffer New York neurotics gladly. She didn’t romanticize darkness or use pain to signal depth. Of course, she had her own hard days, her own heartbreaks and fears, but she didn’t turn them into theater. She let them pass through her instead of magnifying them into a personality trait. And when life got loud, she’d simply redirect—throw herself into a new art project or sit cross-legged on the dorm room floor at 1 a.m., trading stories with friends until the world felt manageable again.
Being around her forced me to recalibrate. I’d grown up idolizing fictional girls whose sadness was stylized. But Katherine was real, and real people aren’t one-dimensional. She contained light and dark in proportions that felt human. She embraced life instead of wallowing in it. That was radical to me. Maybe suffering wasn’t more meaningful than joy?
I wasn’t living some tortured, cinematic life. I was performing one. And the performance only worked because the stakes were low. Which is why, in a world full of knockoff Effy Stonems, you’re the outlier if you’re unironically alive. If you’re walking through a park watching how the leaves filter sunlight instead of smoking Parliaments on a bench by yourself, staring into the void like it owes you something.
I still love Girl, Interrupted and The Virgin Suicides. And I’m still mesmerized by luminous, doomed heroines. It’s hard not to be. But for millions of young people, depression and other mental health hardships aren’t a choice but a chemical lock you can’t pick. There’s no shame in sadness and suffering. But if it’s a pose, if it’s a choice, choose better. If you romanticize despair the way I did and think sadness makes you profound, edgy, or sophisticated, please know this: It doesn’t. Not in the absence of anything else. For me, I got away with it because the whole thing was already a cliché, the kind people instinctively forgive or at least overlook. I was a pretty, thin girl at private schools, playing a part. A lot of girls don’t get to do that. Their sadness isn’t read as glamorous or as evidence of hidden depth; it’s read as ugly, unseemly, and dangerous, something to judge or shame or quietly punish. The world extends very different margins for error depending on the body you happen to be in or the people you happen to have in your corner.
But if you’re the kind of girl who reads Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh, idolizes Effy Stonem, and falls for the gaunt, nicotine-addicted boy you secretly hope to save, listen closely: It’s not cool to turn your suffering into a performance—to chain-smoke cigarettes, to starve yourself, to rot in bed, to stay out all night drinking with older men because Lana Del Rey did it. You can still love The Virgin Suicides without trying to live it. You don’t have to be sad to be interesting. If you’re fully, ecstatically yourself, you’re already inestimably cooler than any character.
