Millennials with Daddy Issues

We grew up gripping chore charts like they were life rafts.
Got gold stars for masking.
Were told trauma builds character — and then got graded on it.

We were the babysitters of younger siblings while our parents chased paychecks through dial-up static and second mortgages.
We knew how to fax before we knew how to feel.
We learned to dream with disclaimers.
To romanticize the cubicle.
To journal our breakdowns on company-branded stationery.

Every generation gets a war.
Ours just came with side effects.
Reality TV.
Lockdown drills.
The slow death of the planet in high-definition.

We built shrines out of vision boards.
Prayed to promotions, lit candles scented like achievement.
Corporate wellness told us to hydrate our wounds and circle back when we’re stable.
We fell in love like filing taxes — cautiously.
But we grieve like crypt-keepers and fuck like the world’s ending.
(Because we wouldn’t bet against it.)

We turn shadow into currency.
Emotional rot into side hustles.
We ghost our therapists and Venmo them guilt.

We make spreadsheets for our suffering.
PowerPoints for our personality.
We unlearn by moonlight and dissociate at brunch.
We were promised the world and handed its haunted Zillow listing.

But don’t get it twisted.
We are the generation who buried our joy for safekeeping and came back with skeleton keys.
Who mourned out loud and made it fashion.
Who survived recession collapse and called it a career path.

And when the last system falls, you’ll find us — rewilding the ruins, planting soft things, where the empire used to be.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This poem marks the final installment in my birth chart series — a chaotic, star-soaked collection exploring the cosmic placements that shaped me. While the previous poems were personal, this one is collective.

If you were born between roughly 1983 and 1995, chances are your birth chart holds the heavy-hitting lineup of:

🪨 Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus in Capricorn

🦂 Pluto in Scorpio

In astrology, these placements represent not just our personal karma, but the generational weight we carry. We are the millennials with daddy issues, the latchkey kids who built empires out of burnout, who took generational trauma and turned it into side hustles, playlists, and group chats that feel like home. We are emotionally fluent, spiritually starved, and still somehow hopeful. We grew up too fast and still feel behind. We laugh in therapy. We cry during productivity seminars. We’re tired — but we’re not done.

This is for every millennial who knows how to write a cover letter and read a birth chart.

For those who stayed soft in a hard world.

For those healing while leading.

For those who feel like a glitch in the system — because we were built in one.

This poem is for you.

We really are the best.

🫶🏻✨

— Missy Matchstick