Down With The Sad Girl Persona
As Mitski said, it's reductive!
The OG sad girl, Miss Lana Del Rey.
When you’re a teenager, your emotions can sometimes make you feel like you’re stepping into the eye of a hurricane. It’s intense, all-consuming, and ultimately, a byproduct of our hormone-addled brains.
Back in the days of yore, I once described myself as an awkward sad girl, codifying my identity with my love for Lana Del Rey and my avid use of Tumblr. And while I still have a soft spot for Born to Die and the dark academia aesthetic, my perspective has shifted dramatically since the days of me being an angsty teen.
Sharing your taste in music and art on social media is a normal way to find like-minded people and connect with them. Whether it’s posting a video from the Beach House concert you just went to or a sweet doodle from your favorite art account, we curate these posts to serve as an extension of our personalities. Putting our likes and dislikes on display is a way we perform our identities in public spaces.
We all yearn for connection and the instant nature of social media can make it easy to find people who think like you, but that’s not always a good thing.
From one of my personal favorite Instagram art accounts, here’s a sad lil bumblebee from @titsayy.
If you were to go on #depressiontok, you would see an overwhelming amount of young people posting sad content, as if feeling sad is as ethereal as a Lana Del Rey song. According to Artefact Magazine, sad girl culture is back and the number of people trying to make depression a personality trait is staggering.
It happened in 2015 on Tumblr and it’s happening on Tik Tok now, except nowadays, it’s Mitski instead of Lana who’s deified as the aspirational sad girl.
Mitski proclaims the sad girl era to be over.
A community like this can be an echo chamber, and when you’re struggling with your mental health, an echo chamber of negative thoughts can reinforce your own negative thinking. At least, that’s what I experienced back in 2015.
The act of ascribing myself to an identity based on my emotions was damaging to me and lots of others my age. We took to self-deprecation and cynicism as if it was the only realistic option, and any other attitude towards life was simply naive. To us, having confidence and practicing self-love was pompous. Even things as harmless as live, laugh, love wooden signs sold at Target were seen as lame and cringe, and overall, delusional in the eyes of “sad girls” everywhere. Why would you want to live, laugh, love when the world is falling apart?
But honestly, props to the people who love their corny, vaguely-aspirational room decor. It’s earnest and sincere and in a world full of cynics, perhaps the bravest thing to do is to wear your heart on your sleeve, but that's easier said than done.
It’s hard to authentically express yourself when there’s pressure to look or act a certain way in order to be relatable and palatable to others. In “The Aesthetics of Self-Harm,” Zoe Alderton says that some online communities like the “sad girls” promote a type of mood performance rooted in a strong visual aesthetic.
The performance of the “sad girl” relies on the idea of cinematic despair, a romantic sort of sadness that can distort your own self-perception. Whether it’s filming yourself crying with perfect makeup to a popular song that’s been slowed down, or creating a supercut of yourself with relatable sad captions. The cinematic despair of the “sad girl” is portrayed as tragically beautiful, and something to emulate within one’s own online presence.
Youtuber olivSUNvia dives deeper into this phenomenon.
As someone who struggles with depression, seeing this type of content is frustrating. Sadness isn’t aspirational. Depression isn’t romantic. Mental illness is not an aesthetic.
I say this because:
A lot of people conflate sadness and depression without an understanding of what differentiates the two.
Once you frame this feeling as a part of you, it’s difficult to break free from that hopeless mindset that nothing is ever going to change.
By performing the “sad girl” persona not only online but in real life too, you end up attracting people that reinforce negative self-talk.
VeryWellMind defines negative self-talk as “any inner dialogue you have with yourself that may be limiting your ability to believe in yourself and your own abilities, and to reach your potential.” Negative self-talk essentially impedes your growth.
And as someone who used to believe that being sad was a part of who I was, going to therapy helped me shift my perspective and let go of habits that were not serving me, one of them being negative self-talk. Surrounding myself with friends and online communities that engaged with negative self-talk reinforced my own bad habits.
A couple of months ago I hung out with a friend who couldn’t go five minutes without putting themselves down or making a self-deprecating joke. It felt odd not only to have been in their shoes but at the same time feel like I was on the outside looking in.
When you’ve outgrown the sad girl persona, it can be a little jarring to watch people perform it. Their self-deprecative comedy routine isn’t as funny or relatable anymore, it’s concerning. I also, unfortunately, realized how alienating that kind of negative behavior can be. It can be draining to be around someone who is constantly negative, their bad vibes bring you down with them.
Around this person, I also felt like in order to find something in common with them I had to be negative, too. They were still holding onto this hopeless outlook on life as if nothing could ever get better and I realized that being around this person felt like I was trying to squeeze into an old pair of jeans that just didn’t fit anymore.
Approaching life with a hopeless mindset limits your potential. Not only that, but interacting with people who still approach life with a hopeless mindset may limit you as well. “Sad girls” build camaraderie based upon self-deprecative humor and negative self-talk, it’s how you relate to one another. However, when you’re trying to shed the persona, it can be difficult to leave the rhetoric behind out of fear that not being self-deprecative might alienate the community or friendships you’ve cultivated. The desire to belong to a community or maintain a friendship can therefore pressure you to act in a way that doesn’t feel authentic to you anymore.
Sometimes, in order to grow and get better, we have to leave behind some of the communities and friendships we treasure. Not because we love them any less, but because they’re holding us back. When we leave those behind who will not grow with us, only then can we truly be able to shed the personas that no longer serve us.
The sad girl persona can be confining and may trick you into accepting your current state of mind as the status quo, as your permanent reality. But the thing is, humans are complex, and we are so much more than the sadness we may feel or the depression we may have.
As Gabi Abrão once said, “We are constantly shapeshifting, adapting, and evolving.”
Amazing article🥰