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I'm 35 And Haunted By A Prom Nightmare
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I'm 35 And Haunted By A Prom Nightmare

Almost 20 years later, I can't shake a recurring nightmare about my prom.

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Cartoons Hate Her
Jun 02, 2025
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I'm 35 And Haunted By A Prom Nightmare
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Prom season is upon us, something I realized when I went to a nearby garden with my family and discovered a colorful flock of teenage girls, statuesque in platform heels, wearing sparkly floor-length dresses. For a brief moment, I forgot that I was a thirty-five-year-old mom pushing a double stroller, and stopped one of them if her dress was the Reformation Britney dress because I was “thinking of buying it myself.” (It was, by the way.)

But…why was I thinking of buying it? I’m not going to the prom, and it’s too dangerously close to white to wear to a wedding. As we walked away, my husband teased me that I was a grown ass adult getting fashion tips from a teenager, and then asked me in what world I thought I’d be wearing that dress.

As I keep running into teenagers taking their prom photos, I am hit with a weird wave of regret and sadness which I can’t fully explain, even though I have no desire to switch places with them and return to my years of being Proactiv’s number one customer. I attended the prom—in fact, I went to three proms over the years, so it’s not like I completely missed out on the experience. Also, none of my proms were especially traumatic in a Degrassi sort of way. There was no sexual assault, pregnancy, drug overdose, and most importantly, Drake was nowhere to be seen.

And yet, despite being almost twenty years out from my last prom, I am plagued by a near-weekly nightmare about the prom. It’s a recurring dream that rivals another one I have which I think is much more common: I’m forced to re-do college because of some administrative error, I’m separated from my husband and kids, and I just found out that I failed to read any of the course material for a Women in Literature class which I’m confident I would have passed if I had done any of the reading (it’s literally always Women in Literature.)

So why does the prom still haunt me decades later, especially when it wasn’t terribly traumatic? Well, it all started…twenty years ago.

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