Mirrors for self discovery: A love letter to coming of age movies

written by Sydney Skeete

As a teenager, my mind was often plagued with the concept of coming of age — a red solo cup at a house party, a kiss by someone’s backyard pool. Intentionally or not, the secrets of my youth were often explained to me on a television screen in the form of infinitely quotable films with incredible soundtracks. Stored in the main character’s wistful glances out of a bus window, or a climactic moment racing down a suburban street in the middle of the night. I never experienced many such dramatic movie moments, and I’m not sure most people did, but I saw them play out on screen, and for me, that was enough.

Every young adult deals with the strangeness found in existing as a human being not quite fully formed. With women, however, it is often in the intense light of such realities that we also learn that the world looks differently upon us. We are taught to check that our tank top sleeves are three fingers wide, learn how to cover up pimples on our faces, or fight the increasing awareness of the space our bodies take up. We either shy away from certain parts of the world or bravely embrace them and face the consequences. There’s something about the revelations of girlhood on screen that keeps me crawling back time and again. There is something all too cathartic about knowing that there are experiences that I did not endure alone. So, often when I look at coming of age, I expect to come to terms with the parts of myself I have grappled with most. Seeing a character in a piece of media and being able to say “Wow, that is so me,” has the potential to validate one’s endurance of the human experience. Being seen, especially in a moment as vulnerable as the self-discovery explored in the coming-of-age genre, is often incredibly reassuring. It can prove that it doesn’t matter if you’re messy and unrefined, you’re as human as the person on the screen in front of you. I think what draws me most to coming of age is this exploration.

Growing up a girl can be isolating. The world continuously screams that our most natural experiences are taboo. I vividly recall being 12 years old and attempting to quietly rip apart my pad in the women’s bathroom. God forbid someone else discovered I was on my period. How humiliating. Society loves to perpetuate the idea that there is something strange about womanhood, and so, we often internalize the myth that our experiences are singular.

When I first watched Carrie (1976) I remember being slightly taken aback by how integral periods are to the story. After getting her first period, the film’s main character experiences verbal and physical abuse from both her classmates and mother. Shortly after, she discovers that she has developed telekinetic powers, and pursues revenge on those who shamed and ridiculed her fears regarding menstruation. While my first period may not have brought supernatural powers strong enough to burn down a room of people who wronged me, it attracted its own set of fears and confusion. Periods were never really discussed in school, so while half of my classmates prepared to face the inevitable, the other half had little to no understanding of what was going on. I remember the stereotypical period jokes thrown in girls' faces if they were slightly moody, and being afraid of accidentally bleeding through and letting everyone know my deepest, darkest, secret: that I was experiencing girlhood.

In a strangely similar way, growing up I harbored another secret. One that I perhaps didn’t fully understand by the time I got my first period; I was bisexual. Bottoms (2023) has to be one of my favorite movies of the past decade. It’s campy and hilariously expresses queer identity in an endlessly silly yet completely genuine way. Perhaps if closeted high school me had been able to see such casual and unabashed representations of sapphic identity, I might have been able to accept my bisexuality earlier on. For such reasons, coming-of-age stories revolving around queer identity often hold extremely special places in my heart. I know that they heal a part of my young self who shivered at the thought of yet another part of my identity being shown to the world without me being ready.

But coming-of-age hasn’t merely helped me understand my past, it has also given me a beacon of hope for my future. The first time I watched Frances Ha (2012), I had just entered my first year of university and was drawn to the chaotic and disheveled nature of the film’s titular character. Throughout high school and university up to that point, I had been perfectionistic to a fault, afraid of somehow messing up my future with one incorrect step. Watching Greta Gerwig’s character messily run through life showed me a piece of myself that I had so long worked to cover up and permitted me to finally accept momentary chaos. It taught me that coming of age doesn’t necessarily end at high school or even university. Perhaps we are constantly coming of age, coming into our way of being, always reshaping ourselves as we uncover new pieces of who we are.

And so I suppose, coming of age has offered me a mirror of self-discovery, proof that my experiences are not as abnormal as I had originally thought. They force me to reconcile with parts of myself that I have long yearned to ignore, and they force me to acknowledge the reality of my experience growing up a girl. And for that, I’m thankful.