Hilary Duff’s New Album Feels Like Lizzie McGuire For Our Mid-Adult Selves

I was in the seventh grade when Lizzie McGuire premiered. As a kid who grew up on ABC’s TGIF and the Disney Channel, I vividly remember all of the commercials and teasers about this new show starring a girl who felt a lot like me. Lizzie McGuire was that girl. She wasn’t the most popular kid in school. She had the besties who had been with her forever, and enemies who had once been close. She had a little brother who drove her insane. And she felt stuck between two identities: wanting to be true to who she’d always been and to explore who she was becoming.

And Hilary Duff has captured that exquisite mix of pain and joy and confusion and excitement with her comeback. Honestly, it’s like we’re getting Lizzie McGuire all over again.

When I was in middle school, I spent a lot of time feeling weepy. Everything was changing so fast. Elementary school had been a cocoon of childhood, a safe place where most of us shared the same interests, ideas, and beliefs. Then middle school walloped me right out of that dream world.

Hormones and puberty exploded in everyone I knew (including myself), and suddenly, the Sunday Scaries were debilitating. I felt constantly homesick, like a dementor was wafting in and out of my personal space, and I tried desperately to cling to the person I was and had always been while trying to make room for the exciting new me emerging.

Lizzie McGuire was doing the same.

Now, as a 37-year-old mom of three, those waves of overwhelm and contentment are back — I’m still confused, still crying a lot, and still excited about what’s to come — and Hilary Duff is singing about them.

Her new album, luck... or something (her first in over a decade) feels like a deliberate representation of all of us millennial girlies who grew up with her. While we’ve all been raising babies and finding ourselves in motherhood, underneath the surface is the old us, mingling with the future us, trying to find her way.

Motherhood, it must be said, feels a lot like middle school did.

On the album, Duff sings about regrets, about relationships that lose their way with the monotony of life and parenthood, about insecurities — all to pop-rock vibes that remind us of who we were:

“I only want the beginning, I don’t want the end”

“Remindin’ me that nobody runs faster than time / It’s heartbreakin’ and reassurin’”

“Are we havin’ enough sex? Are there exes you miss? / And do I nail you to a cross on some bogey shit? / I’m not dyin’ / But I’m dyin’ / I’m worried about shit that hasn’t happened”

“I’m worried that I felt everything I’ll ever feel that I won’t again”

It’s the perfect blend of nostalgia and what’s-to-come, and meets millennials like me exactly where we are.

Just like Lizzie McGuire did.

It’s incredible to me how, at every stage of my life, I’m still growing and learning and trying to figure things out. And I think the first time many of us felt that way was middle school.

Lizzie McGuire was the kind of show that made you feel less alone. While I was talking to my friends about things like periods and boys, I don’t ever remember asking them, “Hey, do you also feel like you’re sort of stuck in this weird limbo land and it makes you want to cry all the time?” But Lizzie gave me that reassurance.

Now, as I raise my daughters and continue to find purpose and cling desperately to the past and to the old me — the baseline me — while keeping things open for what’s to come, Hilary is there again. Singing about a loving relationship that sometimes morphs into a roommate situation, no matter how in love you still are with your person. Singing about finding your way back to yourself without living in the past, about not reinventing yourself, but simply trusting yourself... no matter what it looks like to anyone else.

Inside, I still feel about 13 years old sometimes. And Hilary Duff’s comeback proves that maybe I’m not alone. We don’t shed who we once were like snake skin — we’re like nesting dolls, each version of us tucked into the other. We’re always going to carry our 13-year-old self with us, and with her, we carry our floundering, our hopes, our fears, and our ability to scream-sing in the car with Hilary Duff.