I’ve spent nearly half my life celebrated for my youth; before that, I was a child, so I guess I’ve spent my whole life celebrated for my youth. I started a fashion blog when I was 11—almost a decade ago—and was subsequently hired by different fashion magazines to attend Fashion Week and interview various designers. That industry’s obsession with youth is pretty blatantly around bodies, sexuality, and beauty. At 13, 14, I was prepubescent and unsexy, but I represented another type of youth my new kind-of-peers saw as valuable: prodigal success.

Most people I met at fashion events were not talking to me, but to their impending death; to all the things they hadn’t achieved, and feared they never would. This could manifest as either improbable warmth or unjustified coldness. When someone you hardly know has that many thoughts about you, it’s most likely not about you. But if you share any of their fears—and I do, naturally; I’m like one fart away from becoming Norma Desmond—it can tell you something about what not to become. One note I jotted down in my phone after being talked at by a woman at a party around 3 A.M.:

“Youth is power because you haven’t had enough time to be disappointing. Youth is power because it’s other people’s nostalgia and what if‘s. Youth is power because you’re all potential and promise: no past or proof. Youth’s impermanence represents possibility, but the only possible directions are adulthood or death.”

I knew about youth and beauty, I knew about youth and success, I knew about youth and potential. Only recently have I realized I know a lot about youth and moral purity.

In “Afternoon of the Sex Children,” Mark Greif links American society’s sexualization of young people to our fetishization of youth to our obsession with purity to a yearning for a feeling of personal freedom that no one ever really feels because it does not exist. He writes, “The lure of a permanent childhood in America partly comes from the overwhelming feeling that one hasn’t yet achieved one’s true youth, because true youth would be defined by freedom so total that no one can attain it.” Youth is less a period of time than a state of mind, unburdened by adult responsibilities or moral responsibility or the threat of death; easily obtained by obsessing over youth culture, aiding oneself with products which proudly identify as “anti-aging,” and, yes, safeguarding one’s purity. In “Grow Up,” Josephine Livingstone writes about adult culture’s new-ish fixation with teen girls, particularly their political idealism. I am one subject of it, and I like Carly Rae Jepsen too much to agree with everything Livingstone writes—full disclosure, I appeared in her music video for “Boy Problems,” which premiered on Rookie—but I found myself relieved to read this part especially:

“Women and women’s media who obsess over teen girl culture are in a sense obsessing over a version of themselves that does not have to live as a cog in capitalism and does not (in this fantasy) have to contend with reproductive choices. The teen girl is ever exhorted to ‘just be herself.’ The adult woman has no equivalent option: She must find herself, find love, find money, manufacture healthy babies, find the lost nubile beauty that she left behind at cheerleading tryouts.”

To readers of my blog who were not in the fashion industry, or were in it and feeling demoralized, my youth was precious because it was anti-establishment. Most fashion bloggers then were hobbyists, either in school or working a non-fashion day job, and not yet aware of how to monetize their photos and commentary. This morally pure part of my public identity became more pronounced once I started Rookie, an independent publication not beholden to the demands of a publisher or any advertisers we didn’t want. That was in 2011, and then feminism became more mainstream, which made our reach more plausible, which was exciting. It also helped brands and companies whose first priority has always been to make money—the only goal, the only goal, the only goal—find a new way to market to young people.

The idea of the teenager was invented around 1945, right in the midst of new forms of (adult-made) media. As soon as adolescents were understood to have different experiences from kids or adults, they were also seen as a demographic to make money off of. Years later, the internet made it possible for the teen experience to be defined by actual teenagers and not adults who saw them purely as numbers, and I find it endlessly amazing that teens—particularly those whose IRL communities don’t offer such a space—can now talk openly about what it’s like to be living out what you’re told should be the best years of your life while your brain is still developing and you’re more insecure than ever and sex is a new thing but you feel incredibly unsexy and “just be yourself” is something adults say, not teens, and it’s never actually brought any reassurance. I actually think the human condition could be defined by ostensibly teen-specific insecurity, confusion, and disappointment in authority figures, more than any of the alleged indicators of adulthood. But the literal distinction between teenagers and older humans—not having the right to vote nor financial independence, going through physical changes, being fetishized—motivates me to focus on facilitating this space for the former, even as I’ve entered my early 20s.

Not every adult who’s gotten on board is evil or youth-obsessed, not even close. I’m incredibly thankful for every grown person who has read and supported Rookie because they feel they’re still growing up, and not to relive some idea of their glory days. I am proud of our writers and artists, younger and older, who want to share vulnerability and confusion rather than coolness or freshness.

It’s not up to me, though, if people who are focused on the only goal, the only goal look to us or to me for a new brand of youth to peddle. (Livingstone isn’t saying it is, either.) I am peddling youth just by being my age while doing what I’m doing, and it’d be silly to apologize for that, but I find it interesting that it contradicts the message I actually want to impart to anyone who looks at me and sees a ticking clock: You have all the time in the world. You’ll be reborn many times. You will experience extreme joy and extreme depression regardless of whatever success or failure you experience in your professional life. I live in a state of constant panic and fear and stress unless I take really good care of myself in boring ways, like going to bed on time and taking antidepressants and seeing a therapist and sharing my darkest thoughts with my friends and actually not having Instagram or Twitter on my phone. I feel like I’m in a race against time because I’m used to getting shit done and being celebrated for it, and I worry about how I’ll cope if that ability goes away, or if an audience I’m used to having loses interest. I feel like I’m in a race against time because I come from a childhood where death and loss were too painful to talk about, and I thought I could get ahead of them by making as many things as possible. I feel like I’m in a race against time because people only share a project on social media or in interviews after they’ve finished it, not when they’re working through its tedium, and seeing them makes me look at my greasy keyboard and hate myself and wonder if I should keep a catheter under my desk until I’ve completed enough things to prove that my charmed life was not all just a fluke because the story of my youth had been told enough times to generate some hype.

So that’s what the inside of prodigal success looks like, in addition to the very real benefits of access to people and industries, plus the nearly unbelievable gift of getting to make a living doing what I love, which I have to put in writing every day to remember anxiety is not the whole of it.

I’ve learned in the last decade that my youth and the youth of Rookie’s demographic will be fetishized and commodified and capitalized on, no matter what. I learned that, as with “utopia,” “idealism” is defined by the unreality of its ambitions. That doesn’t have to be depressing, though. Disappointment teaches you what to expect of the people and systems you can’t control, and how to be smarter about what you can. I can choose whether or not to believe my own purity, independently of how young feminists are covered by other media. If I did believe it, I would’ve disappeared before I could ever contradict myself. But I would rather learn in public and make mistakes in public and be problematic than reject the unique position of power and reach that I’ve inherited from my younger self. To that point, I frequently revisit Jenny Zhang’s tribute to M.I.A. that we published in 2012:

“People who do good in the world are not saints, and it’s bullshit to believe that political activism is something only incredibly serious and morally upright people do—that kind of thinking not only makes it very unattractive to be politically active, but it also excuses the rest of us from any obligation to educate ourselves or take action. It elevates the notion of ‘political activism’ to something reserved for the saintly, the extraordinarily gifted, the spectacularly selfless and devoted, like Martin Luther King or Gandhi, both of whom have been mythologized into angelic warriors, leaving the rest of us to think: Well, of course I can’t be expected to sacrifice on that level. M.I.A. is not an angelic warrior or a political pundit or an academic or an intellectual, but she cares about politics and she cares about having FUN and she makes a call to action fun to dance to. And seeing her publicly eviscerated for not having sophisticated or even consistent politics only makes me more determined to help create a space where young people who are just learning what their political beliefs are can do so without fear of being shamed.”