Olivia Rodrigo Can Save Us by Patricia Powers

Photo by Suzie Blackman via Unsplash

When I was younger, I held out hope, some distant fantasy, that someone would discover me and my talent, usually with very little effort on my part. I was optimistic enough to walk about my life holding a little container of joyful possibility, under the assumption that something incredible would happen to me, that life was fun. As I aged, that container slipped progressively from my hands until eventually it clonked on the sidewalk, and I left it behind.

It didn’t take a dramatic moment or tragedy to accept my own mediocrity or feel less joyful everyday. It was like a slow walk away from a place I loved, every now and then looking over my shoulder to catch a glimpse, until I suddenly realized how far away I was. It’s something I discuss with my sister Anne. We are hovering around age fifty, an age at which I am mourning a previous version of myself, one of happy possibility.

My sister and I are both married with kids and have stable lives and relationships. We aren’t particularly suffering; neither of us is in physical pain nor under duress. Having said that, we realize that we’ve said goodbye to the joyful thrill of possibilities we knew as kids. At some point in my life, I accepted that I am average. I’m not going to be famous or do anything extraordinary. I have also, in the both messy and organized responsibilities of life, lost some of the unbridled joy I used to have, much of which I shared with my sister. 

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We slept in the same room growing up. We were the two youngest of five kids. My older brothers shared a room downstairs, and our oldest sister got a room of her own. Anne and I had twin beds on either side of our room which we struggled to keep tidy. We had dark green carpet, shelves of stuffed animals and cheap flowered comforters on our beds. Each of us got a side of the closet, crowded with clothes hastily hung on hangers. Our shoes, once lined up neatly, inevitably ended up in a mess on the closet floor. We each had a small dresser for our clothes and mine was often so stuffed I could hardly close it. We spent Friday nights listening to WINK 104’s request line and Sunday mornings listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown on our clock radio. Songs like “Caribbean Queen” and “Against All Odds.” On nights when I had trouble sleeping, Anne would sing “Amazing Grace” to me, her voice wavering across the gap in our beds until it was a hushed lull as I drifted off to sleep.

One time, in an effort to tidy up, we blasted the radio and lugged the vacuum from our parents’ bedroom into our room, its long cord partially wrapped, partially hanging sloppily from the handle. This was not a light, easy to budge machine. It was heavy with a square face and thick body, and I had watched my mother muscle it around the living room countless times. I shoved it back and forth over our carpet, maneuvering it around our room and up to the unknown territory under my bed where it rapidly sucked up an errant pair of my underwear before groaning to a stop. We shrieked and giggled and tried to wriggle the fabric out of the cylinder. When that didn’t work, I neatly wrapped the cord around the two prongs on the back, and while she kept watch, slid the vacuum back to its resting place in my parents’ room, the radio still crooning away in the background.

Another time I was irritated with Anne for not wanting to play with me. She was downstairs and I was shouting at her to come to our room. “Anne, come here!” I crowed. I repeated it over and over knowing she would get annoyed. My bed was right across from the door of our room, so I packed it full of pillows and pulled up the covers to make it look like I was hiding underneath them. Then I crept into her bed on the other side, screamed one last “Anne, bet you can’t find meee!” and lied as flat as I could. I heard her huffing up the steps and pounding down the hall as she threw herself through the air onto my dummy pillows. “Ha!” she yelled as she landed, and in the same moment, I sprung like a jack-in-the-box from my hiding place, triumphant and wheezing out laughter.

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When I was young, I had high expectations for myself. I sang “Hello Dolly” in the middle school play, imagining I could be a singer or a famous actress. I wrote a few poems in high school and thought I could be a best-selling writer. Ah, the promise (naivety) of youth! But eventually the practicalities of life took over.

I applied to grad school for psychology after college but was wait-listed at my top choice and started to doubt that path. I was tired of studying and being broke, so I took a market research job because it paid a nice salary. It had little to do with what I studied or what I had dreamed I would be. Anne too had great expectations. She was a singer and a drummer, spending hours hammering away on a drum set in our basement. When she finished college, she worked for a record label in Los Angeles for a while. It was tough and gritty work, and it wore her down. After a few years, she found a better paying job with a museum exhibition company.

I stayed with that market research company for almost seventeen years and Anne has now been with the same company for eighteen years. We aren’t unhappy people. But we did let go of some aspect of who we were before, young girls, sisters, with little responsibility, who saw the future as fun and wide open. Recently, during one of our hour-long phone calls, I wondered if it wasn’t too late for joy and possibility. And then I told her about Olivia Rodrigo.

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I discovered singer and songwriter Olivia Rodrigo because my twelve-year-old daughter became a die-hard fan. I listened to a few songs that my daughter played at home, enjoying the guitar riffs and clever, funny lyrics. Her “drivers license” track struck a chord with me and other Gen Xers, drudging up memories of broken-hearted suburban teenagers cruising sullenly past the houses of boys that dumped us. It was so relatable. My daughter and I blasted “good 4 u” and sang at the top of our lungs, dancing crazily in the kitchen, shaking our heads and jumping ridiculously while my husband came out of his office with a confused look on his face. I chuckled over the lyrics of “love is embarrassing:” I told my friends you were the one/After I’d known you, like, a month/And then, you kissed some girl from high school. Was it nostalgia that got me? Maybe, but it felt fun again, like a battery charge. Her concert in Paris hit me hard though, both shining a light on my age and restoring my hope.

Making our way to our seats, curving around the wide halls of Bercy Arena, we passed hundreds of girls and guys dressed in plaid or sparkly mini-skirts, black combat boots, or tiny tanks. Throughout the concert, the stadium became a breathing, heaving mass of bodies, singing every word to every song, loving Olivia fiercely. I was stunned by this outpouring of enthusiasm. She was funny and cute and goofy. She sat on a huge lavender half moon that dangled from the ceiling and spun her around the entire stadium as she waved to every section, “Hey, guys! Hi!” I found myself waiting for her to get to our section so I could wave to her, as if she was waving specifically to me. I was glad it was dark so my daughter wouldn’t see me and roll her eyes. I felt so overwhelmed I couldn’t hold back my tears, as if I was waving goodbye to the happy possibilities of my youth. At the end of the performance, Olivia stood on a descending platform and slowly disappeared into the floor. Just as she vanished, she popped back up for one last “boo!” with a crazy open smile, arms shot up in the air.

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I don’t think what my sister and I are experiencing is so unusual, and I’m certainly not the first one to write about it. We gripe over the monotony of making grocery lists and dinner. We get into good cycles of exercise and then they fall victim to work or kids’ activities or travel. We complain about our husbands saying things like, “Well, if you would just tell me what to do, I’d do it.” We had dreams. We ran into obstacles. We were only average or maybe we were good, but we weren’t great. We needed money and we were tired. We got jobs and we kept going. We’ve had marvelous moments, but we did lose something. I sometimes mourn the person I was before – the one who carelessly vacuumed up underwear with the radio blasting and hid under bedcovers to scare her sister. But she’s not completely gone. I just need to pull her out from under the covers.

I listen to Olivia’s songs and some still make me cry. I hum them while walking the dog, while making dinner. I sing them loudly in the bathroom when I have the house to myself. Sometimes I can’t get them out of my head when I go to bed at night. But instead of waving goodbye to my twelve-year-old or twenty-year-old self, I’m thinking about popping her out on stage for one last “boo!”

Patricia Powers studied psychology and creative writing in Philadelphia and had a lengthy corporate career before returning to writing. She now lives with her husband and two daughters in Paris, where she works as a freelancer. She has a personal essay forthcoming in Bridge Eight.