This American Girl doll is stressed, depressed and TikTok-obsessed.
Twenty-year-old Nora Dayy wakes up every morning to her fourth alarm, if she’s lucky, and almost immediately her hand finds her phone. She knows it’s not healthy and definitely spikes her cortisol, but TikTok has long been a constant in Nora’s morning routine — and afternoon, evening and night routines.
Still, she tries to stay positive. There’s always something to hope and dream for, right? But with the world descending further and further into chaos, Nora’s life is a cascade of new crises, challenges and barriers.
Before her sophomore year of college, Nora took comfort in the idea that she was isolated from at least some of the issues she saw on her phone. But since the summer of 2025, that bubble has effectively burst.
Nora grew up in Minneapolis and has always loved the city. She has her favorite coffee shops, where she and her friends have spent a small fortune over the years, and she keeps a running list of all the thrift stores and independent book shops she wants to visit in her free time. Of course, that would require her to find free time between her class schedule and three jobs she needs to pay rent in the city, but that’s beside the point.
She started working at a boba shop over the summer near the University of Minnesota campus, where she’s a second-year psychology major. But when Operation Metro Surge began in December of 2025, and 3,000 federal immigration enforcement agents filled the city’s streets, the shop temporarily closed down, so Nora put in extra hours trying to get her content creation business off the ground — again.
Nora tries to be the positive one in her friend group. Life is better when you look on the bright side. But she found it challenging to do this during a federal occupation, especially when the people around her were afraid to go outside.
Amid this fear, Nora decided she needed to step up, delivering groceries to her friends and volunteering with a community support group supplying food and household essentials to people in the city. This work gave Nora hope. If everyone works together, everything will be OK in the end.
On top of volunteering throughout the years, Nora has always been a good student. She did her best balancing Advanced Placement classes in high school while also serving as student body president and captain of her school’s debate team. But her eighth-grade class basically skipped learning geography when her school moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, so to say Nora can get confused in her Geography of World Affairs class is an understatement.
But thanks to modern medicine, Nora’s sophomore year of college has been considerably less stressful since she started anxiety medication.
Nora’s life would be almost put together if it weren’t for her inability to find a promising job that doesn’t involve scooping boba, conducting mind-numbing research in her school’s psychology lab or posting mediocre dance videos on the internet. The job market is Nora’s current nemesis.
During spring break of her sophomore year, Nora went to a job interview for a social media manager position at a social psychology startup. The interview was easier than she’d imagined, but on her way back to her apartment, she spotted a rat — a fat rat — that had been run over by a bus, creating a small horror scene that would haunt Nora’s dreams. To make the moment better, the hiring manager ghosted her. But Nora is resourceful. She knows she’ll figure things out somehow.
To top it all off, matcha is becoming more expensive by the week.
Nora switched to matcha after she realized that if she kept consuming coffee at the rate of the bullet trains she wished existed in America, she might have heart problems by 30. Her mom, a certified coffee addict, says matcha tastes like grass. But she also thinks Nora can easily find a boyfriend on Hinge.
Nora doesn’t want Hinge or a boyfriend.
She went on one Hinge date during her freshman year of college, only to discover he was a philosophy major who, to her horror, walked into the cafe 20 minutes late carrying a cream-colored tote bag that read, “Together we can smash…the patriarchy” and featured a prominently displayed Labubu. He sat down and proceeded to talk uninterrupted for an hour about how he “doesn’t subscribe to toxic masculinity anymore” and “only listens to Clairo,” while sipping his overpriced matcha latte. Nora is now sticking to dating women.
But through all her struggles, Nora tries to stay positive. Everything will work out in the end if she just manifests and holds onto hope. After all, delulu is the solulu, right?
