GIRLHOOD

A GLIMPSE AT YOUTH, FRIENDSHIP, AND SELF-DISCOVERY IN SUBURBAN NEW JERSEY.

By Jazmine Hughes

I hated being a child. I found it less of an era of my life than a condition of it, a trial to be endured. I was plagued with equal doses of rules and responsibility, yet largely deprived of personal agency, physical autonomy, and—worst of all—privacy, as I shared a room until I got to college. What resulted was a period of dissatisfying stultification, wherein I spent most of my preteen years waiting for them to be over, every adult a symbol for a life on the other side.

What I loved, though, was being a girl, an image unhindered by parents or friends or siblings, a person you got to be in the delicious solitude of your own imagination. My sense of participation in a community of girls came together pretty early. I admired girls, I envied women, and I took all my how-to-be-a-person cues from the ones who surrounded me. In school, I made easy friends with those in proximity to my desk, but all my consumption—my private life—was about other girls. I was obsessed with my best friends, Nancy and Tabitha, and the secret character we invented who played a huge, comedic role in our lives. For a while, before puberty—and Jimmy Brooks, woo-wee—redirected my attention, I only read books about other girls, listened to female artists, watched television with women leads. I would read anything that started with the words “A Girl’s Guide To…” and I was praying to get my period, so I could ascend into what was then considered the highest rank of femininity: getting cramps.

Womanhood is the most fitting stop yet for me, with all the best bits of girlish serenity and adult agency mashed together. It holds my proclivities well. But as young girls start to return to my life—my younger sister, who will forever be a girl to me, somehow became an adult and had two daughters—I have started to wonder if I fast-forwarded through more good parts than I realized.

Talking to the girls featured in this story, I was struck by how committed they each were to trying things out. No one was unhappy, but everyone wanted to see what else was out there. They were as hopeful as they were young. There is a weightlessness that I see in my nieces, too, that I can’t believe I once had, their hearts pure and sugar-sweet. Youth is an era of motion: It motivates, encourages, tests. Spending time with these girls was like finding that dress in the back of the closet I’d been fishing for: the freedom to try.

Photographer Sabrina Santiago handpicked the eight girls shown in this series from her hometown in suburban New Jersey, about an hour outside of Manhattan. She scouted the places where she would hang out when she was their age—smoking weed by the fence, hanging out with friends by the creek. Spending time with the group made her realize how much has changed since her time growing up there. “There’s something so beautiful about that—seeing girls so in the heart of it, and I’m so far out,” she says. “It’s a good reminder that things that were really difficult at the time are not even a drop in the bucket now.” Life, always, goes on.

—

When I was a teenager, I pored over magazines and blogs, trying to decipher the code that would make me the sort of girl I wanted to be. But now, the most important part of being a teen girl is being yourself. When I ask them for advice—“let’s say I’m an alien from outer space and it’s my first day as a teen girl”—Nayeli, Rilynn, and Jess turn equal parts reflective and encouraging. They are insistent on confidence. Not a pridefulness that stems from having the best clothes or nails, but from your personhood—how you show up as yourself and how you make other people feel. Nayeli says to try to connect with people who have similar likes and interests, and to be honest and kind. (Later, these are the exact words Rilynn uses to describe her friend.) “Confidence is definitely key in anybody’s life, but especially being a girl, because girls will put other girls down, for sure,” says Nayeli. “People can be very judgmental.”

“If that happens,” Rilynn says, “just know that everything will turn out to be okay. Just be yourself and find your people. It doesn’t matter if you’re friends with the popular girls.”

Rilynn met Nayeli through a mutual friend, and Jess and Nayeli met in science class, where they started a slime business. They made enough money for Jess to buy herself a hoodie from a fancy boutique. Every weekend, Jess and Rilynn go to Starbucks, then Wendy’s, then they get fro-yo.

Nayeli describes Jess as very energetic, a wild card. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up, and to travel widely. Two months ago, she went on a school trip to France, and seeing a different culture widened her perspective on life: She is more curious about the world than ever. When I ask them if they want children, Jess quickly and firmly offers a resounding no. “I definitely don’t want kids. I like them temporarily, like if I’m teaching them, but I want a return policy on them.”

They’re feeling so done with high school: “It’s kind of sad to see everyone go, even though I don’t like a lot of people in our grade.” But it’s not like the future is certain, either. They know it comes with more responsibilities: Nayeli only has one parent, so she’s had a lot to be in charge of from a young age. Still, she definitely wants to make a lot more money than she has right now

The girls are bullish on the future, especially in politics. “It’s cool that we have people like Kamala running,” says Jess. “It’s good for the girls. We need someone. If everyone does the right thing for the country, it’ll make a huge difference.”

Rilynn is uncertain about the future: It’s like she wants to fast-forward and see what college she goes to or what job she ends up in. She wants to get married in her early 30s, and have two boys first, and one girl, so that the boys can protect their sister, and a beach house. Nayeli wants to move to Montana because she’s originally from Idaho and has always liked the country more than cities. She doesn’t want kids, but you never know; she’ll only get married if it’s the right person. But all that stuff still feels pretty far away: “I just go through life day by day.”

Time has been moving strangely since the pandemic. Not forward or backwards, but running in place: Everything is changing at turbo speed, while they’ve remained the same. “I still feel like I’m 14,” Nayeli says. The pandemic put two crucial years of adolescence in amber. “I feel like I paused in time almost, and now everything is moving so fast. I’m about to be in college. It’s weird. I missed my prime time to be a kid, so now this summer is my last chance, because I turn 18 soon. I’m just trying to live it up.”

—

Here’s something I should’ve done when I was 15: cultivated a better sense of style (or any style at all). Luna tells me that fashion is both a confidence booster and an icebreaker. “Because people will always be complimenting you, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, thank you… Do you want to hang out?!’”

It worked for her: She and Kezia have been friends for two years. They met because Kezia, a transfer student to the middle school, was setting up her locker, and Luna complimented her outfit. Their bond spills out of them. Sometimes they start talking at the same time, punctuated by an over-the-top bow to the camera, a hand extended: “No, I insist.”

Part of the reason they get along so well as friends is because they also get along with each other’s families. They both have older brothers who got perms, and once, Luna’s mom invited Kezia’s brother over to the house for dinner because Luna’s brother wanted to apply to the same college he was attending.

Take it from Luna: TV and movies get the expectations of being a teenager all wrong. “I feel like they have these super high expectations,” like that high school is going to be an amazing place where they’ll meet tons of new people. “But I knew all of these people from middle school! I just go to more classes now.”

What’s good about high school, though, is the experimentation. Nothing is set in stone. “I’ll probably change my personality again, be a whole new person,” Kezia says when I ask her how she felt starting her sophomore year. She knows exactly how she’ll do it, too: She keeps a folder with notes about specific characteristics that she wants to implement, like being more focused on schoolwork. Luna doesn’t know if and how she’ll change. “I’m pretty similar to last year.”

Adulthood has its perks: that same experimentation of teendom, plus freedom. “I think it’ll be fun to be independent and get to choose where you want to live,” Kezia says. She’s always wanted to live in New York, but worries she’s not sociable enough to fit in. “I’m excited to grow. I’m scared of growing up in general, sometimes. I’m scared of the responsibilities, and the taxes. I have to learn about that. Also, college—I have to actually be smart.”

Luna feels similarly. Sometimes her dad wants to teach her how to do adult stuff and she refuses. “I’m like, ‘Dad, I’m 15, please, I don’t want to learn it.’” She has to savor it while she can, before it melts away like candy on your tongue.

—

Girlhood is a shorthand, a secret language: We’re all different, but our feelings and experiences are often the same. Early crushes, hair woes, the brutal and humiliating work of becoming who you are in front of an audience, with expectations and demands and advice you never asked for. It’s best to stick with the people who get it. “For me, girlhood is just being able to have a group of people that know what you’re thinking without saying, and just being able to relate to a group of people that you haven’t met before,” says Sabrina. She’s 17 and wants to go into the medical field, like her older sister. “That’s the difference between boys and girls—they might not be able to make friendships as fast as we can with each other.”

Madison is fine with being a girl in this day and age. It’s okay. Nothing special. “But I have more opportunities now than my mom.” There are advances in technology, in communication, in what girls can do and want and look like. There are female roles everywhere. “I feel like I can do anything.”

For Madison, it feels “totally normal and natural” to be interested in math and science. (Her engineering teacher is a girl.) Madison has loved engineering since at least first grade, when her mom took her to a robot building class. Hers moved when you waved your hand in front of it. She wants to be an engineer when she grows up, one who builds or designs roller coasters: “Maybe if you build them, you can get free passes."

Stephanie definitely wants to study art. She is serious about her practice: “I go to an art high school right now, and I feel like every time someone graduates they go into being an eye doctor or an attorney or something.” She gets a little exasperated. “It’s like, Then why go to an art school?” Not to mention: “I don’t trust these people with my eyes!”

Girlhood is a support system, no matter how old you are or when your membership begins. “Just look out for others like you would want others to look out for you,” Sabrina says. “There’s been so many situations where I need a pad or something, and another girl has it, silly things like that.” Imagine if we all treated each other the way we wanted to be treated, the way we needed to be treated, the way that we would treat each other if we all understood what it was like to be a girl: uncertain, undaunted, faces turned toward the sky.