By Lauren Hunter (she/her)

On one of my most recent rotting in bed scrolling through TikTok sessions, I came across a video that said, ‘The hardest thing I ever did was survive being a 14-year-old girl’. Hard relate. It’s an experience that was… character-building, to say the least. I doubt any of us look back on it too fondly.

By the time we reached 16, we had emerged from the fiery pits of hell that were first periods, sudden acne breakouts, hair growing in places we never thought it could, and the existential meltdowns that not having a cool enough JD Sports bag to put your PE kit in could only induce. Suddenly it felt like there was light at the end of the tunnel of the fever-dream high school politics, and dare I say it, we might have even started to like how we looked? Those first experiences of trying on mini dresses in the Topshop changing rooms (RIP) in preparation for sitting in your pal’s gaff at the weekend chugging Smirnoff Ices were truly seminal, giving us our first glimpses into adulthood that would surely stay as rose-tinted as this forever and ever…

Except five years later, here I am now at 21, combatting yet another Mount Everest that has sprung up overnight on my forehead, already holding back the tears when I realised I’ll need to shave again (not for the first time this week), and then being tipped over the edge when that size 4 Topshop dress I bought yesterday – ahem, in 2019 – magically no longer fits. In the trusted words of Taylor Swift, ‘I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending’.

You wouldn’t be alone in your horror and dismay at having to flog half your old wardrobe on Vinted while frantically Googling gym memberships and HIIT workouts. But therein lies the con – it’s not you, it’s the second puberty.

I can already hear your sobs through the screen. I know you thought you’d left those hellish days of sex ed lessons behind (sorry), but this one is probably worth a second of your time. According to the Sexual Health Alliance, hormone levels for both men and women reach their peak in your early twenties, with the greatest extent of physical changes observed between the ages of 18 and 21. The penny’s finally dropping, isn’t it? But although you now know you’re not alone, admittedly something about it still feels very isolating.

This was made evident to me by a friend not so long ago. As per, I was moaning about loads of my clothes not fitting anymore – I thought my essay stress-induced chocolate binges had eventually taken their toll. She pointed out that, actually, I’m at the prime age for the second puberty, and it was more than likely just that. “Surely not’, I said, ‘no-one else says they feel as bad as this!”. “No, they don’t say it’, she explained, ‘but they definitely are feeling it”. That’s what makes this so difficult. As much as we might like to project that we’re all body positive, there’s no getting away from the fact that weight and appearance are still taboo topics that nobody wants to discuss for fear of offending someone else or making themselves seem insecure. In this sense we’ve shot ourselves in the foot when it comes to the second puberty because a) it’s not the type of subject you want to broach during your post-lecture coffee dates and b) when you go online, you’re greeted with the classic line, ‘It’s not a medical term’, so we just then assume it’s not a real thing and blame ourselves.

Well, it very much is real, and that blame has to end. The second puberty is something everyone will experience no matter your gender identity, body type, or anything else. We might not be comparing ourselves as much to Victoria’s Secret or GQ models anymore, but we certainly still are towards our teenage selves. Think about that for a minute – you wouldn’t say you were smarter, more mature, had better fashion sense (the list could go on) at 16 than you do now, of course not. It’s a completely different version of yourself, a *literal child*. So why would you still want that body now?

A lot of this is so much easier said than done, and it’s not as if I’m some expert preaching to the masses. Yes, this phase in our lives can be a struggle for many reasons, but it shouldn’t be made more difficult by being silenced on something that’s actually a universal experience. I find mostly that acceptance is the hardest bit. Maybe I should make a TikTok that says, ‘The hardest thing I ever survived was watching myself change as a 21-year-old girl – but I learned that it’s ok’.