Where's My Teenage Dream?: Consuming Foreign Media, Comparing Myself, and the Feeling of Missing Out on Life by Kyle Talag

There I was, watching the downpour through my window, stuck in quarantine in the height of the pandemic. I was daydreaming of a summer romance in Cousins Beach, entertaining the idea of camaraderie and burgers at Luke’s Diner, wishing to be as cool as characters in K-Dramas.

The movies and TV I watched during quarantine portrayed young love as passionate and lighthearted. The nonchalant boy falls harder for the girl in When I Fly Towards You (2023), and meeting a walking green flag like Chief Hong in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha (2021). Yet even now that quarantine has been lifted, I’m still the same boring person; I stay at home binge-watching Gilmore Girls and wishing I could be a pretty bookworm girl with a pretty bookworm boyfriend, living in a small town like Rory Gilmore. Where can I find a Jess Mariano in real life?

I only had close friendships with other girls throughout my adolescence. No, I never entertained the prospect of adventure with the opposite sex. Rebellion, underage drinking, and smoking cigarettes are the usual vices of teens in Western media In contrast, films from East Asia portray teenagers as light and modest, oscillating between passionate romance, fulfilling friendships, and stressful studying. I can relate to the stressful studying, but less so with the romance and friendship. What defines a fulfilling friendship? Although I have a small circle of friends where I feel secure and happy, I don’t always feel content because the movies make me feel like there’s something missing.

I also can’t help but feel that my body, my face, and my overall self are inadequate. Characters like Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter series and Regina George in Mean Girls (2004) have a certain charisma that makes them stand out from the crowd—a main-character charm that draws you to them like a moth to a flame. During quarantine, I tried to curate my own unique identity, to be the main character of my own story. I was delighted by the idea of being different from others. I call it the character amalgamation: I dissected the style, personality, and actions of specific characters, then mixed them all together and applied them to myself.

I was that bored and lost and lonely. When Stargirl (2020) was released, I wanted to be like Stargirl Caraway—she wears whatever she wants, she’s completely individual. She was the ideal, my quintessential model.

Products of human imagination can be unrealistic and irrational. But teenage life in foreign media is idealized and romanticized because it's out of reality—it diverts from the bleak edges of real life.

My world isn’t as dramatic as the life of Lara Jean from To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018), whose sequestered presence in high school turns unexpectedly romantic. I didn't have the courage to confess to my crush, I never spoke up in class,, and I was scared to even commute to school via a jeep...everything was scary as a teen. God, I was even convinced I’d get bullied for my looks after constantly being told as a child that my brown skin made me ugly.

I've watched plenty of teen movies from the Philippines that sometimes have the same themes as Western or Eastern teen movies—but if this is the life of teen Filipinos, then why is my life not like the movies?

Where’s my teenage dream?