Girlhood Painted in Blue

The sad girl. She’s flickering in the blues of the eyes of Effy Stonem, lingering in between the pages of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, quiet and in her thoughts. Do you know her? Are you her?

There is something inherently feminine about sadness—a sad girl, as they call it. She is more than just a figure in media, more than just an aesthetic to behold. She stands in a silent rebellion, but you’ll never know why. The question dances around in my mind: We admire this girl, but how come?

Ever since I reached the age to successfully understand media, I instantly felt a pull to the world of sadness. It was what surrounded me the most, so why not indulge? I found it mesmerizing that these pretty girls on my screen could feel these deep emotions like me—that I, too, could be a pretty girl with deep emotions. A girl with secrets, mystery, and allure, that saturated the music, films, and TV I immersed myself with.

At age 12, I began feeling impending doom. At age 13, I experienced Skins UK. Cassie Ainsworth lured me into a trap I had set up for myself at age 14. At age 15, the sadness grew, and for some odd reason, at age 16, nothing got better. The media I resonated with comforted me, and it pained me to leave. I didn’t know who I was without this feeling. I was no one. I’d always been no one.

As you can tell, I was keen on the dramatics back then.

Yet all we ever want as women is to be seen—to have our stories written for us in a way that others can understand, to have our femininity displayed across a screen. At least that’s how I saw it. Directors like Sofia Coppola and Greta Gerwig curated the female experience on screen because we were not being heard by the right demographic. There were characters like the misunderstood teen Ladybird or the ultimate girl in despair, Lux Lisbon. It was like sadness was what made girlhood.

I had always admired my sister at a young age. She was the ultimate teenage girl—she had all the best media in her time, like Twilight and Looking for Alaska. It wasn’t an era to look back on, but something new was forming.

“I think back to the first time I heard “Video Games” by Lana Del Rey. The way she portrayed sadness and nostalgia was so hauntingly beautiful. It felt like a cultural moment where we were all allowed to embrace our darker emotions,” my sister Brianna Colmenares said.

She was the Tumblr girl I envision to this day, my inspiration for my teenage years. From the moody, smudged eyeliner surrounding her eyes to the edgy clothes she chose to wear every day before she left the house for school, it felt almost like a protest.

She goes on to talk about media like “Skins UK, Twilight, and The Vampire Diaries—those characters dealt with so much trauma, and it felt relatable. It was like we were all part of this shared experience of grappling with emotional intensity.” There was an obsession where it was not just aesthetic images on your timeline. It became a lifestyle for girls to go through.

And I think when writing this piece at this very moment, that is what I am most enthralled with. The aestheticization factor. I was joining these communities on Twitter and Tumblr that represented my deepest emotions through photos and words. Girls with bruised legs, cherry red lips, disturbing thoughts, and powder pink rooms consumed my feeds and made up my Pinterest boards. In 2022, I was utterly obsessed with these platforms—it was all I spent my time doing. These easy-on-the-eye pictures made up for my destructive thoughts.

“Seeing these very like, kind of self-destructive characters, or people who were so like, there was no direction. But there was an element of like, okay, this is something that's done, this is what your teenage years can look like,” Sophia Brousset, who wrote a piece titled “The Cult of the Sad Girl” for The Saint, shared.

Similarly to Sophia, who shared her vulnerability both with me and in her piece, it’s almost this inevitability future we’re destined to have as teenagers. I was destined to feel this way because that’s what I saw in these beautiful aesthetics and pretty characters in the media.

“No, what I was seeing was actually more distorted—the world that I was looking at was actually not accurate. This kind of really nihilistic view of the world. This view of like people is horrible—everything is doomed. It was actually not an accurate picture,” she shared.

I guess that is what an influence like this does, doesn’t it? “I just find it less noble. I don't think it's necessarily like the thing that I want to, like, aspire to,” Sophia had thought.

Looking back on it now, the thoughts and feelings I was having and what I believed them to be were a tainted version of the world I saw. And not just me, but millions of sad girls out there.

When the clock struck 2024, a renaissance began since society saw themselves in characters in film, television, and written works in the 2010s. It was the 10th anniversary of an era that had forever been marked with an infatuation with sadness like no other. In 2014 and beyond, sadness became a central focus in the media, representing girlhood.

What I mean by this is that I felt the femininity of my emotions represented this stage in my life. There was that feeling of being seen by women, but on the other hand, I used those emotions to create. I think that is where a lot of my inspiration stems from.

At 17, I noticed myself straying further away from what I was used to—translating feelings into stories. Shepherding me to write my college essay on the film Black Swan and the reasons that it shaped my formative years. Like Sophia and my sister, I used my most intimate feelings to create something larger than myself.

“I think that the idea of madness or mental illness creates, being a source of creativity. And there's been this sort of glorification of the madness as something that is what makes. This, this person special or creative, then I think it's just this very strong cultural trope that's been around for a long time,” author of 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture, Fredrika Thelandersson, explained.

That’s where this transition from the teenage “sad girl” to a newfound understanding of womanhood begins. I didn’t see myself the same in the characters that I loved. Media quickly became something I stopped letting myself get lost in, instead becoming a window of personal interpretation because my feelings are not the same as someone else’s online.

Everything is so individual.

“One way of seeing it is how it has evolved from this sad girl to, you know, multiple different kinds of girls. What I’ve seen is like things circling diagnosis, like “ADHD girl,” and I identify myself with this notion of trauma like that. It has almost moved to a more biomedical approach with more diagnoses being like an identity online instead of something so broad,” Fredrika stated.

This is where the danger lies. When a trope like the sad girl moves beyond the screen and becomes a structure for self-identification, the line is blurred.

As my sister put it, “It risks romanticizing real mental health struggles, making them feel more like a trend than genuine experiences. It can blur the line between authentic emotion and a curated online persona, leading people to feel like they need to perform their sadness to be seen or validated.”

That sad girl once described before still exists. Now she is tailored to the languages of psychiatry. It reaches beyond this aesthetic and reaches into a reclaiming of identity in illnesses that coincide with the sad girl, depression, ADHD, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and more.

The edit shown is an example of things that fill my very own feed—things I once held space for because I craved being related to them.

There are still ways of being seen. We can create a community where we feel heard and can replace the performance of being seen with genuine conversation.

Sadness does not define me, and it does not define you.

I’ll admit I have not entirely outgrown the girl I knew myself to be. Like many other girls out there, I am learning to balance my life with my darkest emotions. I acknowledge the room for sadness in my mind, but I created honest conversations like I had with Sophia, Fredrika, and Brianna. Our inevitable sadness can exist without the need for harmful aestheticization.

That is where this conversation ends.