The Era of the “Thought Daughter”

By: Natalie DeVito

What started as a controversial TikTok trend amongst young interviewers asking a derogatory and rather deleterious question insinuating undesirable outcomes being, “Would you prefer a ‘thot daughter’ or a ‘gay son’?” What emerged from this is a reclaiming of the word “thot” mixed with a test of linguistics and out came, “Thought Daughter” which has taken its own trend and has spoken to a generation of girls all over. She lives in all of us, and if you think she doesn’t live in you, think again. If you took a second thought, this proves you’re an overthinking “Thought Daughter” just like the rest of us.

Are your shelves stuffed with the writings of Sylvia Plath, Sally Rooney, Patti Smith, Dolly Alderton, Otessa Moshfegh, Simone De Beauvoir, or Hanya Yanagihara? How about your walls? Are they covered in photobooth strips, postcards from years ago, or album covers? And are your ears filled with Phoebe Bridgers, Adrianne Lenker, Fiona Apple, Jeff Buckley, Mitski, Ethel Cain, Searows, Boygenius, Gregory Alan Isakov, The National, or Sufjan Stevens? Is your closet is filled with vintage clothing, jewelry and cameras, niche tote bags, and hoarded clothing that you can never seem to get rid of? Consider this your formal diagnosis of being a “Thought Daughter.”

Introducing the “Thought Daughter:” we spend hours overthinking, watch the same movies over and over again (specifically Lady Bird for a quarter life crisis every few days), spend too much time on one journal entry, cry until we can't breathe, but also laugh until we cry, and have a slew of crystals on our bedside table at all times. Whenever we’re on public transportation we remember how we’ve never gotten over anything in our lives ever as we stare out the window and wait for our stop. Oh, and we also always have the Essie shade “Wicked” painted on our incredibly uneven nails. 

We drive with the windows all the way down and drown out everything else with music so loud that it will be sure to damage our eardrums in the future, while simultaneously going into autopilot as our playlist transcends us into a multitude of memories. We save every receipt we’ve ever come into contact with and be sure to put it in a scrapbook somewhere, just for the odd chance that that day was one we needed to remember. We also frequently go through the box of birthday cards we’ve saved for years, stain it with a few more tears, and put it away for the next time we clean your room and stumble upon them. 

We most likely all have a tote bag or t-shirt reciting Lauries monologue confessing his love to Jo in Greta Gerwig's 2019 Little Women film. And we will never stop thinking about the answer to Elio’s mother's pressing question, “Is it better to speak or to die?” taken from a German translation of Marguerite of Navarre's Heptaméron encompassing Luca Guadagnino’s film Call Me by Your Name. We will never walk into an English class or read a poem without thinking of “O Captain, my Captain,” and the long lasting lessons of life and death learnt from Dead Poets Society. And we will never drive under a long winding tunnel casting a yellow light without wanting to reach through the sunroof and out stretch our arms like a bird, throw our heads back, and close our eyes and scream, “In this moment, I swear, we are infinite,” from of course, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. 

Being a “Thought Daughter” means reading into everything, thinking that everything is a sign, and placing deep meaning on almost anything. In theory it sounds exhausting, and it is, but in the split moments we are overthinking how much we feel, we circle back to how beautiful it is to feel everything a little too much. The highs are high and the lows are low, but at least every little feeling we have is noted and marked in every journal and scrapbook we own. We stare at the moon for a little longer than normal, listen to one song over and over again for a week straight, most likely one with devastating lyrics, lose ourselves in fictional characters in books, and question anything and everything the second the seasons change and the wind changes its course. 

Everything turns into something as a “Thought Daughter.” One thought turns into another and soon our notes app is swamped with notes from days we look back on and can’t even remember what it is we were on about. Although our thoughts are fleeting and quick, there does come a time that they come back to us, and we return to our notes app to finish that thought, or perhaps have another take on it. We are ever evolving, as we cannot stop thinking, and that's the beauty of being a “Thought Daughter.” But for now, it's the first week of July, and we have a bit of time before we start to overthink into the beginning of Autumn.