The joy of being a ‘girl’ even when you’re in your 30s

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If girlhood was something we rushed through or never really got, it’s almost funny how loudly it has reappeared in our thirties. Open any of my group chats and you’ll find the same language looping like a chorus: “the girls are going out”, “call the girls”, “girl, listen to me”, “I need the girls on this.” Nobody types, “Dear women, shall we gather?” We’re the girls.

The rest of my life is aggressively adult. I am the emergency contact for myself. I have doctors’ numbers saved. I understand the difference between different types of insurance. There are tabs open on my laptop about funds, legal structures, compliance, insurance, and personal growth. When shit hits the fan, there is no older adult stepping in to fix it. The older adult is me.

And yet, the moment I step into a living room where my closest friends are sitting cross-legged on the floor with iced coffee, the entire energy shifts. Shoes off, bra unhooked, eyeliner smudged. We are thirty-somethings, but the vibe is unmistakable: we are the girls, and we are home.

There are the shrieks and groans and dramatic re-enactments. There are the outfit approvals. There are the screenshots (so many screenshots) of texts and DMs we would never admit to caring about in public. There is the forensic analysis of a three-word reply from someone’s situationship. There are the unhinged voice notes dissected line by line. There is the “Okay, show us the new thing you bought, do a haul.”

It’s not that the problems are smaller now. If anything, they are bigger. We’re talking about IVF cycles, break-ups with people we thought we’d marry, burnout so severe it makes us forget our own email password, parents’ illnesses, financial anxiety, careers that look shiny from the outside but are actually hollow. There are no school exams left to blame. We are in the long, unglamorous middle of our lives. I write about all of this and the invisible labour, the emotional math, the unassuming ways in which women shrink themselves to fit rooms that were never built for them in my debut book, The Girls Are Not Fine, out on April 30.