what a tiktok of a girl dancing in target taught me about people:
I was scrolling through TikTok DMs from my friends when I stumbled on a video with 2.2 million likes that genuinely entered me into a flow state. It was a girl in her 20s, freely dancing in the middle of a Target dressed like a 5-year-old who picked out her own outfit, repeating things like: “I’m allowed to dance! I’m safe to dance!” Of course I instantly ran to the comments. So many thoughts flooded through my head, not out of judgement—but more like my curiosity bone was on nuance-overload and had a lot to process. Let’s just say, I was not expecting the whirlwind of insight on raw human behavior I got from this random video.
Everyone unknowingly showed which side they stand on. The split was wild.
The vast majority wrote things like: You’re an adult, not a child. This is concerning. It makes sense—in their eyes, they see a girl being psychotic, insanely weird, and obstructive. What surprised me was how bothered people seemed to be, as if her dancing and singing in the aisle was a trigger. A comment said, “imagine you clock in for your afternoon shift already having the worst day ever, and you see this.” They acted like that that girl would ruin their day because the cringe was actually visceral. I personally am pretty unfazed by seeing stuff like this, but maybe that’s just me.
The minority on the other hand were saying stuff like: You guys just don’t get it. She’s just expressing herself freely, this is a form of semitic therapy and rewiring. Then the middle-grounders chined in with understanding, claiming that dance therapy is great, just not in a Target where people go to shop. They think she’s distracting and in the way. Fair enough.
But the most interesting part wasn’t the content. It was her response, which was…almost spiritual gaslighting.
She claimed she didn’t expect the hate at all, and in fact—she loved it, because it meant that she “triggered everyone’s inner child” and that they should explore why. Truthfully, I don’t think triggered mine awake—I think mine had already been awake, and was more so triggered by the performance this seemed to be. The thing is, I agree with what she was getting at. I just didn’t think her delivery was there as she failed to address the elephant in the room: nuance. She framed every negative reaction as proof of someone’s unhealed wounds. But sometimes…people are annoyed because you’re blocking the paper towels.
This girl also insisted this was her “authentic self.” She overemphasized, “I love that me expressing myself triggers your inner child,” but my here’s first thought: Is this really you expressing yourself? Or are you just trying to prove a point? I believe that anyone who, not only is clearly dramatizing a moment, but also sets up a camera to record said moment, is never authentic. She was gaslighting her audience into thinking that the free-spirited, child-like joy of being alive should be the day-to-day baseline, the byproduct of being high on life. But of course that’s not feasible, and shouldn’t be anyway. When I shop at Target, I’m not in the state of mind to be blissfully free. I’m in a practical, focused, grounded mind—and I like it. I love my energy, and I love this chapter of my life. My soul feels learned and I feel awake. So why should I fix what isn’t broken? If I’m grateful for my life, my inner child is heard, and I love who I am, isn’t that all that really matters?
The majority fought back, unintentionally saying a whole lot about the human experience—they claimed, “we’re not upset or triggered, we’re concerned.” They couldn’t fathom that a grown adult was acting like a child. One pointed out that kids picking out their own outfits was never that deep, parents just don’t want a fight in the morning. And a comment back to that one said, “anything can be deep, you’re choosing not to not go there.” That line stuck with me.
Because it’s true: childhood wounds are everything. They shape everything. Even how we react to a stranger twirling in a store.
The girl in the video is reparenting her inner child by literally cosplaying as her. It could be healing and liberating to accept that we’re still the free, creative, and safe kids we once were. Wisdom is literally built off of wanting to strip down the layers, and that your fears, triggers, and obstacles are a result of something. Something which deserves reparenting.
Here’s my actual take: the nuance everyone skipped.
Her Target act had good intentions, but she fails to acknowledge that humans evolve for a reason. It’s healthy to grow up—the idea is to integrate our inner child into our adulthood, not regress to it. We need to face our open wounds head on and let our trauma travel through our bodies so we can create space for what’s really important: love, peace, fulfillment. We need to realize everything that holds us back is old conditioning from childhood and it doesn’t have to be like that. We can work through those wounds by unleashing ourselves like the girl in the video did. But we use that as a tool to regulate, not as a re-becoming. We are already becoming. We’re just more resilient now because we took the time to get to know ourselves.
The comments on this video revealed that a lot of people lack the ability to look inward—or the awareness to know that’s even an option. And when they see someone acting freely, they reacting according to the layer they live on. The majority allowed themselves to be triggered by and didn’t bother asking why. They just accepted a blanket statement that it would make their bad day worse. Was everyone’s inner child wounds actually triggered? In a way, yes. They were people reacting from their childhood triggers, who saw themselves and their wounds in her. Every comment revealed a layer: surface, wounded, awakened, integrated, performative, avoidant, self-aware, self-unaware.
Most people just accept the surface level truth: that since they got triggered, the girl in the video must the problem. Only a few dig deeper to question the truth and what they know about it. And that—not the dancing in Target—is the most interesting part of all.
