Gen X, I need to talk to us for a second. Because we spent our childhoods hating “the man,” and somehow some of us grew up and became the man. Rude, honestly.

We were the generation of The Breakfast Club, Footloose, Rocky Horror, goth kids, theater kids, skaters, band kids, tomboys, quiet kids, weird kids, kids who lived in black eyeliner, kids who lived in flannel, kids who were “too sensitive,” “too dramatic,” “too masculine,” “not masculine enough,” or just generally confusing to the adults in charge. We KNEW those kids. Some of us WERE those kids. We just didn’t always have better words for what we were seeing.

We had “weird.” We had “freak.” We had “tomboy.” We had “sissy.” We had “loner.” We had “attention-seeking.” We had “marches to the beat of a different drummer,” which was adult code for, “I have no fucking idea what that kid is doing.” And now, decades later, kids have more language. 

They can say queer. Trans. Nonbinary. Autistic. Neurodivergent. Sensory-seeking. Dysphoric. Masking. And sometimes adults hear all those words and think, “Where the fuck did all that come from?” From our homeroom, dude. That’s where it came from.

It was sitting three desks over from you in algebra. It was backstage during the school musical. It was smoking behind the gym. It was the kid who somehow already knew every word to Rocky Horror before the rest of us knew what the hell a midnight movie even was. It was your cousin. Your teammate. Your best friend. Maybe it was you. The people did not suddenly appear because the vocabulary got better.

We just got better at naming things. And yes, sometimes kids try words on. We did that too. We tried on identities through music, clothes, hair, politics, religion, relationships, and some truly unforgivable fashion choices. (I’m looking at you, neon jelly shoes AND the blisters you rode in on.) Some of us dressed like Madonna. Some of us dressed like Robert Smith. Some of us dressed like we lost a fight with a switchblade. Nobody called a congressional hearing.

The point is, young people have always experimented with who they are.

What’s different now is that some of them have language that helps them describe themselves more accurately. That is absolutely not a crisis. That’s information. And this is where I think Gen X has a choice. We can look at younger people and say, “We didn’t have all these labels when I was your age.” Or we can remember that maybe – just maybe – those kids were always around us, but we had horrible labels for them.

Because the goth kid was still there. The gender-nonconforming kid was still there. The autistic kid was still there. The queer kid was still there. The kid masking so hard they disappeared inside themselves was still there. We just called them something else. And sometimes we made their lives harder because of it. That’s the part I do not want us to skip.

We loved rebellion in the movies. We cheered when Ren McCormack danced. We hated Principal Vernon. And we all – COLLECTIVELY – lost our goddamn minds when Billie Jean cut her hair and screamed “FAIR IS FAIR!” We rooted for every kid and teenager on screen who refused to fit neatly into the box the adults built for them. Then some of us grew up and started asking kids why they couldn’t just fit into that same box. As if Robert Smith, Boy George, David Byrne, George Michael, Prince, Grace Jones, or Cher, who has talked openly about her dyslexia and dyscalculia, never fucking existed. That is one HELL of a plot twist.

So when a kid uses a word you didn’t grow up with, you don’t have to panic. You do not have to understand it perfectly on day one. You don’t have to pretend your own generation had everything figured out, because respectfully, no the fuck we did not. We were stealing lighters to heat up our .99 cent eyeliner and emotionally communicating through mixtapes.

Let’s stay humble. You can ask what the word means to them. You can listen. You can learn. And you can remember that unfamiliar does not mean new. Sometimes it just means somebody other than you finally found the language. And if we spent our whole childhoods hating “the man,” maybe the least we can do now is stop becoming him.

That’s all for now. For more, please visit rainbowrootsmedia.com. And don’t forget to take good care of yourself today.