The Scam of Being 25

Spoiler Alert: This Isn’t the Best Time of Your Life

I recently heard that Lena Dunham is making a comeback to TV with her upcoming Netflix show Too Much, so I started watching Girls again. When Girls first aired in 2012, I was 31, just a few years older than Hannah and her friends. I was living in New York City, journalism degree in hand, trying to make it in the new, low-paying frontier of digital media. So Girls was for me. But it didn’t feel good.

I was hate-watching (or maybe cringe-watching) back then. It felt unbearable. Too raw. Too narcissistic. Too much. Now I realize: it wasn’t the show that was too much. It was me. Or rather, it was everything I hadn’t yet been able to face about that period of my life.

Because Girls wasn’t lying. It was telling the truth about something most of us aren’t allowed to say out loud: that your 20s can be fucking awful. And not in a cute “growing pains” way. In an ugly, existential, soul-aching way. And girls in their 20s aren’t allowed to be ugly.

Society tells women in their 20s that it’s supposed to be the best time of our lives. We’re young. We’re beautiful. We’re desirable. Which is code for: we’re useful to men. And therefore, we should be grateful.

But that’s bullshit most of the time. Lena Dunham put it like this: “You’ve been told you’re in the prime of your life... but you feel the least in control you’ve ever felt.”

I remember it so clearly. The way men wouldn’t leave me alone—not because they were drawn to who I was, but because I made them feel potent. Like vampires, they were sucking off my youth. I was a mirror they could pose in front of. And I was too unsure, too underpaid, too insecure to break the illusion.

I didn’t know who I was yet. Or I should say I had a sense of who I wanted to be, but I didn’t think I was allowed to be myself without risking the male attention I was supposed to covet, or the courage or confidence to say “I don’t care.”

What I liked. What I wanted. I was still learning how to say no, still learning I was allowed to say no. My desire wasn’t even a language I could speak fluently yet, it had been filtered so many times through the male gaze that it barely sounded like me.

Just as an example, I had a boss at a floundering national media brand who only yelled at the women under 30. After meetings, we rotated through the office bathroom—one of us sobbing while the others whispered comfort and dabbed tears with crumpled paper towels. Nobody yelled at the men. Ever. And we didn’t know how horrible it was because … men treated us horribly all the time.

And still, we were supposed to smile. To feel lucky. To be told, in subtle and unsubtle ways, that this was as good as it gets.

In one episode of Girls, Hannah says: “I feel like I’m definitely the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.”

At the time, people mocked that line. But watching it now, I hear something different: I hear the desperation of someone trying to believe she matters in a world designed to make her feel disposable. I hear the ache of trying to carve out a self under constant surveillance. Trying to become whole while being picked at and consumed.

When Girls first aired, critics lined up to call the characters “unlikeable” and “self-centered,” as if self-absorption were a crime unique to young women. But were they really any more unlikeable than the cast of Entourage or Mad Men? Or was it that watching the raw, messy, unfiltered inner lives of young women, complete with contradictions, neediness, delusion, ambition, and heartbreak, was simply inconvenient for a culture that prefers its young women glossy-haired, light-hearted, and palatable?

The show refused that performance. Instead, it gave us hunger, confusion, narcissism, vulnerability, and yearning without apology—and for that, it was vilified. Maybe what we were watching wasn’t bad behavior, but simply the uncomfortable truth of becoming.

And then something wild happened. We survived. We crawled out the other side of our 20s—scraped up, calloused, clearer. We stopped trying to be a reflection. We become a presence.

And in some ways I am grateful for it. There is something singular about being a woman emerging from her youth that no man can fully grasp. It’s the experience of having spent years as prey—desired, pursued, consumed, dismissed. That prolonged vulnerability sharpens us. It steels us. By the time we cross into our 40s, many of us have already survived decades of being hunted and underestimated. It toughens us in ways our male peers often don’t have to confront—or don’t encounter until much later.

My 30s were still rough, but so much better than my 20s. Now I’m in my early 40s and I love my life. I love who I’ve become. I know what I want. I have a job I love, enough money of my own, and no interest in being palatable. Nobody yells at me. Nobody dares.

And that’s the thing: they lied. Our 20s weren’t the peak. They were the scam.

Lena Dunham once said: “I feel I’ve made my career out of voicing the uncomfortable, and that’s what I’m still doing. But I’m no longer willing to martyr myself for it.”

Same, girl. Same. I, too, am no longer willing to martyr myself for permission to use my voice.

Now that I’m in my 40s, I see another scam for what it is: the idea that older women resent younger women. That we see them as competition. That aging makes us obsolete. But I don’t feel that at all.

What I feel is a kind of sacred protectiveness. A solidarity born of bathroom floors and whispered reassurance and long nights of wondering if we were broken. We weren’t.

We were just being gaslit by a culture that punishes personal exploration and rewards confusion—especially in young women.

If you’re in your 20s and it feels terrible, it’s not because you’re doing it wrong. It’s because you’re waking up. You’re seeing the scaffolding and the manipulation and the loneliness for what it is. You’re feeling the cost of being desirable in a system that doesn’t want you whole, just hungry.

But you won’t stay there. You’ll grow. You’ll gather yourself. You’ll stop explaining. You’ll stop begging. You’ll start telling whoever needs to hear it to fuck off.

And when you do, the world won’t like it, but you won’t care.

We aren’t competition. We are allies. We come back for each other. We tell the truth. We protect each other. And we say what we never heard when we needed it most: It’s not the best time of your life. The best time is still coming—and it is so much better than they want you to know.

In spiritual solidarity,
🧿 Alexandra ✨