The following essay is a piece I wrote for Heartbroken Zine for their Issue #2: Coming of Age. You can buy the issue on their site here.
Coming of age is a tricky thing to navigate. I’ve found that it’s quite hard for me to pinpoint moments in my life where I’ve sensed growth or tangible change. Some of us have extraordinary experiences to look back on when we think of how much we’ve grown over the years. But, for those of us who don’t, we have to sort through the boring database of life events that’s implanted in our heads.
Maybe we have something symbolic in our lives that has changed with the times and that represents our own personal change. Maybe it’s something simple and obvious, like our wardrobe. Maybe it’s something a bit harder to label as concrete evidence toward our coming of age, but is still representative of it, like our taste in music. Maybe it’s something in between. For me, it’s my bedroom wall.
When my younger sister moved into the guest room in our house, I was excited to finally have my own space. To finally be able to arrange the bed and furniture the way I wanted, and to finally decorate the wall the way I wanted. I never got around to the first thing (mainly because there was no particular way I’d wanted to arrange the bed and furniture), but I got to work quickly on the wall.
Soon enough, it was covered in Tiger Beat posters of One Direction and Ariana Grande. Heart and star wall stickers. Autographs of Disney World princesses like Tiana and Belle from our family’s last visit to the park, when I lost my autograph book and had to get their signatures on mailing address labels from the post office.
After I got a Teen Vogue subscription in middle school, this version of my wall — this elementary-school-girl wall explosion — slowly but surely became undone. Down came the Jonas Brothers cutouts and the Justice catalogue pages of girls my age in shiny tracksuits and sequined graphic t-shirts. Up went cutouts of perfume samples and photos of models walking down catwalks and wearing Chanel in grassy fields. Some of my previous decorations, most notably a poster of Harry Styles, remained. That era wasn’t completely over yet; it was fading slowly and bleeding into this new era, this “more sophisticated” era that was consumed by an interest in fashion and modeling and journalism and magazines like Teen Vogue that introduced these things to me.
In my later middle school years, as my relationships with my friends grew stronger, relics of our time together were hung up too. Photo booth strips from school dances and birthday parties, polaroids from concerts and after school excursions around downtown Philadelphia. They were hung side by side with the magazine photoshoots, my friends and I sticking out our tongues and throwing up peace signs among models and celebrities standing straight and looking serious.
Throughout high school, my wall grew more and more into a culmination of my interests and relationships. No longer just photos of me with friends or family, but also things that reminded me of the times I’d spent with them. There was a series of acrostic name poems my friends and I had written for each other on a piece of scrapbook paper. A poster advertising the 2016 Boston Calling festival that my friend and I stole from a bus stop because it featured some of our favorite artists. Handmade birthday cards with bold, cursive lettering. Stickers and signs we made for our school’s Mock Election. Ticket stubs from movies we’d seen together. A map of the London Underground that I used during a trip to England to visit family.
My evolving interests also shined through in different ways. No longer just pages I’d ripped out of magazines and plastered on the wall, but things that I collected and created because of these interests. A framed, blown-up cover of an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. Harry Potter and Glossier postcards. An article I wrote for a journalism program about how the Internet has reinvented secondhand shopping. Even my love for magazines was immortalized through collages I made, featuring letters big and small, and miscellaneous cut-outs of floral fabrics and perfume bottles, accompanied by larger silhouettes of models or celebrities I liked. And in the corner, the smallest sliver of my younger self peeking through: a creased, 8 ½-by-11 poster of One Direction, circa 2012.
I’m proud of my bedroom wall. I’ve used it as a backdrop for pictures of items I sold on Depop. Before I left for college, I would constantly rearrange it and take things down when they felt out of place or no longer significant to me. I’ve even tried to recreate something like it on a smaller scale in my dorm room. I think it captures perfectly who I am and how I’ve grown over the years. Every relic it features is from a moment I consider significant to my personal growth. It’s cluttered and messy, and therefore, it’s the perfect model of my coming of age journey.
