Would teenage you think you're cool?

On Lorde, childhood dreams, ambition and connecting with your inner teen

Behind the scenes of Lorde’s ‘Hammer’ music video on Hampstead Heath

A few months ago, I stumbled on a letter to my future self. I wrote it when I was 15, holidaying in Portugal, picking fresh figs off trees and trying to forget how much I hated myself. I spent the week between the pages of books, only coming up for air to write stories of my own. It was the last time my grandmother would ever go on a holiday abroad. She was sleeping next to me in the hot afternoon sun as I wrote the letter.

I asked my future self if I was still friends with my current school friends (no) and whether my grandmother, dozing beside me, was still alive (also no.) I asked if I’d published a book (you guessed it – no) and if I’d fallen in love (once, briefly.)

My teenage self should be happy I made it through those turbulent, brooding years, but I know she would be sad about my school friends, my grandmother, the book, the love. If I met my younger self for coffee, she might think I was cool, but she would probably be disappointed. Fortunately, I’m not trying to impress a mentally ill child.

On ‘What Was That?’ Lorde combs through the tangled hedonism of youth to find gems of bitter clarity amid the cigarette smoke. It feels like a letter to her teenage self, a suggestion that every iteration of ourselves exists at once in the same moment. Listening to it feels like being 20 again, with the nostalgia for being 17 already pumping through my veins. Lorde’s Rolling Stone interview makes repeated references to feeling like a teenager. Taking up smoking again, lying in the grass with her headphones on, dressing and acting more loosely.

When Lorde found fame as a teenager, she was close to untouchable. The critically heralded prodigy whom David Bowie declared to be, “The future of music.” This heady momentum returned with the release of Melodrama. Then, in 2021, Solar Power broke the spell. Some fans liked it, but overall, the album was a critical and commercial flop. It felt out of step with the moment. We couldn’t all throw our phones in the sea and live on the beach. We had to go back to work in a pandemic-wrought economy that lay in tatters. But self-indulgent nostalgia will never go out of fashion. It makes sense, then, that Lorde is reaching back into her past. If you grew up with her, or you’re a similar age, her past is also your past.

Unlike Lorde, most of us were no one in particular at 17. We were waiting to be. We were not Lorde, but we could be. We could be anything. Potential hung around the edges of every experience. Each night spent smoking cigarettes and blowing our pupils up could be the best night of our lives. Tomorrow, we would be famous singers and writers and actors. It didn’t matter. There was time.

It’s this potential that we mourn as we grow older. There’s less time for dreaming. You have to start doing. That’s why so many of us like to dip back into the past, to remember who we could have been back when we could have been anything. Back when we smoked cigarettes without feeling guilty. Back when long, languorous afternoons in parks blurred together in long school summer holidays. Back when my grandmother was still alive in the hot Portugal sun and all the great love stories of my 20s were awaiting me.

Boy Meets Girl (1984)

In Leos Carax’s 1984 film Boy Meets Girl, the 22-year-old protagonist laments at a party, “I wanted to be someone outstanding – flyer, traveller, musician… Can I be reborn?” The future you imagined in the past sticks around like food in your teeth. “I was really going to be something by the age of 23,” Winona Ryder’s character bemoans in 1994’s Reality Bites. Moving on from what you thought you would be is not always easy, especially if you don’t like to let your dreams die. Some people give up. If you can’t be outstanding, why be anything at all? Others remain in a state of perpetual burnout, throwing themselves against a closed door until they are mentally and spiritually bruised all over.

You cannot bend yourself backwards into the past forever. One day, you have to choose to meet yourself where you are. You are an adult now. You cannot afford to mope like a teenager. It’s possible to keep your dreams alive and stay sane while doing so. You may never be a teenage pop icon, but you can keep writing lyrics and poetry, take singing classes, go to open mic nights, start a band. Realising that being successful or pursuing success isn’t a prerequisite for doing what you love can be a freeing.

The letter to my future self was not the only artefact I found while decluttering my teenage bedroom. Old dreams reared their wrinkled heads. In Just Kids, Patti Smith writes, “I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.” That hunger is piled up all over my old bedroom. Most of my teenage dreams revolved around work and art. I wanted the two to go hand in hand.

Moving to Paris is the first time in my life I’ve felt like I’m working to live rather than living to work. Evenings are spent taking long walks through the tangled city streets or meeting new friends on old terraces. I can feel my dreams mutating. Caring less about things you once cared boundlessly for is refreshing, like waking up from a deep sleep without any residue tiredness.

Still, connecting with your inner teen can be a gratifying experience from time to time; journaling, rewatching films you used to love, taking a bus down to the sea. All the things you loved before work and laundry and adult responsibilities got in the way. Lean too far into it, though, and it can stunt growth. We are not teenage girls in our 20s, no matter how much Lorde makes us feel that way. Sure, “It drives you crazy getting old”, but you don’t have to keep trying to impress your teenage self forever.

Some things I’ve been loving lately:

Song: ‘You’ve got time and I’ve got money’ - Smerz

Album: Get Sunk - Matt Berninger

Substack: Is Anyone In Love Anymore? by

Amelia Ward