One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

Kennedy presents a lineated poem describing her childhood experiences from the 2000s. The poem questions who she was during this era and why.

Kennedy remembers the first time she saw popular-girl handwriting, or PGH. She describes the characteristic loops and swirls of PGH and remembers her attempt to imitate it. Kennedy was always proud of her penmanship, particularly her ability to write in cursive. Her version of PGH was messier than the other girls’. The more she studied PGH, the more she noticed what it said about various girls’ personalities. She likens this phenomenon to what different typefaces might suggest about a person’s character.

In elementary school, Kennedy and her classmates were separated into two groups: the “talented and gifted” and the “not talented and gifted” (114). Kennedy wasn’t in the former program and often felt insecure that she wasn’t as smart as her classmates and friends. She tried to distinguish herself by practicing PGH and developing new scripts. She doodled and invented new fonts using gel pens, black paper, and the back of her hand. Then she started offering her services to her classmates. She would ink classmates’ hands or write special messages for them on nice paper in her free time.