Millennials Compare Their Awkward-Fugly-Braces Middle School Era to Middle School Gen-Z’s Perfect Make-up Tutorials and Viral Dance Trend Phase and It’s Not Pretty

Ahh, remember being 13 years old? The sweet smell of body odor, the tearing sensation of braces on your inner lip, and that nagging desire to get your cartilage pierced because Stephanie Montgomery’s parents let her get one and WHY DON’T YOU EVER LET ME DO aNyTHiNg, MOM?!

The Tween-age years are supposed to be a horrible, awkward, and inescapable hell in everyone’s life. It is agreed upon by all children as they age and go through puberty to be a useless, angsty mess of a person with no attractive or proportional features who has NSYNC posters on the wall but still plays with Beanie Babies. That was what we all agreed, right?

Not in 2022. 

13 year olds nowadays, through TikTok, have discovered that just because you have your braces color coordinated to the seasons, doesn’t mean that you’re doomed to be exceptionally weird and uncoordinated. As a matter of fact, it’s a little disturbing how adult and grown up 13 year olds have become. 

Throwback

Every time there’s a new TikTok dance trend, it seems like the middle school aged kids are the first to jump on it, crush it, and show every REAL adult that we, in fact, are the ugly ones. Don’t get me wrong, most kids in the 90’s and 2000’s were also doing dance routines, its just that nobody saw them but our poor deprived families when we forced everyone onto the living room couch to watch a “dance recital” that we put together with our cousins. 

Trust me, that’s not a quality performance like what we’re seeing on TikTok nowadays. 

I have no explanation

What 13 year olds really need to be doing is worrying about what pajamas they’re wearing to the next sleepover or if the scab on their knee is going to heal in time for the first day of school. But no, now, with the whole Internet watching, 13 year olds are learning choreographed, nearly professional level dance routines with their friends, no doubt obsessing over who has the shortest skirt and which lip gloss to wear. 

Isn’t this how Mean Girls started? 

Either way, we all know that despite the dance moves, 13 year olds everywhere are still a disaster– they’re just hiding it much better than the generations before them. 

Me at 13