Going Back to Go Forward?
(sorry if this seems rushed/random/long or whatever. i had a lot of feelings)
This month's Rookie theme is "first person", which is great because lately I've been thinking about how one constructs and defines who they are. It's something that I've been struggling with lately, particularly since it was my birthday last week, which always puts me in a reflective mood. Now that I am out of school and out of work and out of friends, I just sit at home and worry about my health and just think about things (like myself. I am what is wrong with my generation.). I still don't know how to answer "who am I?" but the question that has been more intriguing to me in the past couple of months is "who was I"?
In order to answer the question "who was I?", I have to go back to the past. I love to think about the past and I hate that I love it so much because I feel like it's a barrier to being here now. I want to be in the present. I don't want to look back in twenty years and wish that I had done more at 21 than watch Disney Channel commercials or early *NSYNC TRL appearances on YouTube. That fear doesn't stop me from going back to watching them. Living in the past is like a shield that prevents you from having to question the way things are in the present. It prevents you from engaging with the now, because it means having to face who YOU are now. There are costs to being heavily into the past. The nostalgia - "the pain from an old wound" - is exactly that, painful at times. I feel it in my gut. I want to go back, and I have to live with the fact that I will never be able to.
Why do I feel so obsessed with needing to know who I was? (And how does one find that out anyways?) I guess I feel like I need to know who I was in order to know who I am now, in a "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it" sort of way, but that's just an excuse to go back to the comforts of the things I know all too well in my choices of what to listen to, what to watch, what to look for and what to talk about. It's an excuse for going on an extended nostalgia trip. Anyways, I'm heading into adulthood so what do I need to learn from my childhood about that?
But maybe it has something to do with this feeling of disconnection with the past that I am trying to fix. Tavi Gevinson has written in the past, as well as in this month's Editor's Letter, about her obsession with documenting everything that has happened to her so she knows that it was real and that it actually happened (or at least I think that's why - maybe I'm wrong). I don't feel like I did that very much or very well when I did in my teenage years. My middle school years feel like they're some sort of dark ages due to the scarcity of personal photos (both pictures OF me or pictures that were taken BY me), personal notebooks or just THINGS in general from that time period (IT WAS ONLY TEN YEARS AGO!).
In this way, I envy my 13-year-old brother. I've documented his life from the moment I've had access to a computer and a digital camera, which was when he was around 4 or 5. I was the first one in the family to have a digital camera, so I gladly took up that responsibility. My parents never developed photos, which always irritated me. He doesn't let me take many pictures of him anymore because he's all MOODY TEEN right now, but he and his friends live in the Instagram generation so I have no fear that his middle school years won't be documented. He'll probably wish his life wasn't so documented.
I almost feel like my middle school years and my early high school years were a dream because there's nothing hard, nothing definite to show me how real it actually was. I don't have many physical artifacts I can look back on (who has the money or space for that? NOT ME) so I have to rely on pop cultural things to remember how I was before. Perhaps I'll be forever obsessed with those kinds of things since they let me know I was really there. Like what I did today - I looked up this Billboard chart from exactly ten years ago this week.
My middle school years feel like a dream because I was lonely back then. I hopped from friend group to friend group unsuccessfully in the 6th grade, because I wasn't sure of my place since all of my elementary school friends were changing, which meant our relationships changed too. I became more timid as the year went on, and I became an actual, real loner in the 7th grade, partly due to my shyness, but mainly because I was a weirdo. I was briefly bullied for a time. Two of the girls who used to tease me became my best friends in the 8th grade, but we never hung out outside of school and we lived with a sort of dark cloud over our heads all year because knew we were all going to different high schools. I started high school feeling scared of being alone again and feeling untethered to anything or anyone (which was GOOD! But still...). I don't really have anyone to talk to about those days. Those two or three friends I still have as friends on social media - well, it would be too weird to talk to them about it (yet). I don't talk to them regularly and I don't really want them to know I'm obsessing about middle school, which probably speaks to how I shouldn't really be thinking that much about it.
It also feels dream-like because I didn't keep good journals back then. I have a 7th grade journal and an 8th grade journal that I struggled to maintain because I felt like it was a chore since my life was so boring. I wish I had written all those boring things down now. I wish I had more confidence in my creativity back then. I wish I had a little more self-esteem. I still do.
So if I was lonely and sad and unsure of myself back then, why do I WANT to remember that specific time period? Why do I go back to songs that sometimes can remind me of that time in my life and how uncool I really was? That's something I can't really answer. Maybe they're just plain good songs regardless of what was going on in my life. Maybe they remind me not only of school but other, better things - driving around with my mom after school, watching MTV when I would come home from school,hearing those songs while shopping or at a fair.Maybe I take some sort of pleasure in feeling bad about myself. I know all of those things factor into it, but I want to say it's because they remind me of all those feelings that I used to have which let me know that those memories are real and I really lived through it, in absence of any documentation that lets me know for sure.
High school feels like a dream, but in a different way. I had friends. We did teenager things together. I took pictures. Sure, I could've taken more. The main problem is that I didn't do much beyond taking pictures. I didn't keep a journal or a blog or anything - I stopped journaling because school and MySpace got my full attention. I was tired - I went to school, came home, browsed blogs for an hour, did a TON of homework since I was in honors and AP classes and then went online for the rest of the evening. It's hard to explain how important having an awesome MySpace page was if you weren't a high school student in the mid-2000s. I took that shit so seriously, because I thought the world was going to read it. I took deliberate care in every word and picture and song on my page. I was going to show you how cool I really was. My peers and I were constructing our own identities, which was a wonderful thing. But I never saved anything because the thought never occurred to me to do so. I never saved any of the hundreds of revisions to my "About Me" (that's not an exaggeration). I never downloaded my silly blog posts. I never kept a log of all my profile songs. I didn't think to save comments people made to my page or messages I sent to my best friends over some dumb teenage drama or my stupid answers to surveys that I would post as a bulletin to all my friends. I spent so much time on MySpace, constantly revising and rewriting who I was...never did I stop and think about archiving all that shit. It would be wonderful to have all that now so I could have a clearer picture of who I was back then. I didn't keep a notebook back then because MySpace functioned as one, in a weird way - it was an outlet for my creativity.
I started using Twitter nearly six years ago, towards the end of my junior year of high school, so I feel a bit grateful for being somewhat of an early adopter. I started using Facebook in my senior year, but I never put anything on there that I wasn't comfortable with the public potentially seeing (and I still don't!) so it didn't work in quite the same way MySpace did for me. I want to beat myself up for not journaling very much in the past five years but I have not only Twitter and Facebook updates to look back on but LOTS of digital files and photos PLUS physical things I've managed to hold onto like notebooks and doodles that I have saved which I could probably use to reconstruct the past five or six years of my life, day-by-day. There's probably been only a handful of days where I've left absolutely no digital trace. I'm sure we all can do that. Society has changed. Doing so would not the same as reading your deepest, darkest personal thoughts in a journal but at least you would know that you were doing...you were busy being you. And that's all I want to know sometimes. There's a comfort in that.
***
So much for not wanting to live in the past, right? By writing all of that, I've done exactly what I didn't want to do. Is there a distinction to be made between watching Hilary Duff videos and looking at old photos from my e-mail outbox that I forgot I had or are both activities just pointless and backwards and all the things I don't want to be? My answer, at least right now, is that there is a distinction. I want to find out who I was in order to construct my own personal narrative. I want to be in charge of my own life story as much as I possibly can. One of the ways I can do that is by digging into my past and collecting evidence and archiving what I can. I want to know that my life so far hasn't been completely pointless.
(OR MAYBE I CAN GO OUT AND START DOING SOMETHING THAT WOULD MAKE MY LIFE A LITTLE LESS POINTLESS. YOU CAN'T GO BACK. YOU CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING.)
This month's Rookie theme is "first person", which is great because lately I've been thinking about how one constructs and defines who they are. It's something that I've been struggling with lately, particularly since it was my birthday last week, which always puts me in a reflective mood. Now that I am out of school and out of work and out of friends, I just sit at home and worry about my health and just think about things (like myself. I am what is wrong with my generation.). I still don't know how to answer "who am I?" but the question that has been more intriguing to me in the past couple of months is "who was I"?
In order to answer the question "who was I?", I have to go back to the past. I love to think about the past and I hate that I love it so much because I feel like it's a barrier to being here now. I want to be in the present. I don't want to look back in twenty years and wish that I had done more at 21 than watch Disney Channel commercials or early *NSYNC TRL appearances on YouTube. That fear doesn't stop me from going back to watching them. Living in the past is like a shield that prevents you from having to question the way things are in the present. It prevents you from engaging with the now, because it means having to face who YOU are now. There are costs to being heavily into the past. The nostalgia - "the pain from an old wound" - is exactly that, painful at times. I feel it in my gut. I want to go back, and I have to live with the fact that I will never be able to.
Why do I feel so obsessed with needing to know who I was? (And how does one find that out anyways?) I guess I feel like I need to know who I was in order to know who I am now, in a "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it" sort of way, but that's just an excuse to go back to the comforts of the things I know all too well in my choices of what to listen to, what to watch, what to look for and what to talk about. It's an excuse for going on an extended nostalgia trip. Anyways, I'm heading into adulthood so what do I need to learn from my childhood about that?
But maybe it has something to do with this feeling of disconnection with the past that I am trying to fix. Tavi Gevinson has written in the past, as well as in this month's Editor's Letter, about her obsession with documenting everything that has happened to her so she knows that it was real and that it actually happened (or at least I think that's why - maybe I'm wrong). I don't feel like I did that very much or very well when I did in my teenage years. My middle school years feel like they're some sort of dark ages due to the scarcity of personal photos (both pictures OF me or pictures that were taken BY me), personal notebooks or just THINGS in general from that time period (IT WAS ONLY TEN YEARS AGO!).
In this way, I envy my 13-year-old brother. I've documented his life from the moment I've had access to a computer and a digital camera, which was when he was around 4 or 5. I was the first one in the family to have a digital camera, so I gladly took up that responsibility. My parents never developed photos, which always irritated me. He doesn't let me take many pictures of him anymore because he's all MOODY TEEN right now, but he and his friends live in the Instagram generation so I have no fear that his middle school years won't be documented. He'll probably wish his life wasn't so documented.
 |
| Real, concrete proof: I WAS A BAND GEEK. |
I almost feel like my middle school years and my early high school years were a dream because there's nothing hard, nothing definite to show me how real it actually was. I don't have many physical artifacts I can look back on (who has the money or space for that? NOT ME) so I have to rely on pop cultural things to remember how I was before. Perhaps I'll be forever obsessed with those kinds of things since they let me know I was really there. Like what I did today - I looked up this Billboard chart from exactly ten years ago this week.
My middle school years feel like a dream because I was lonely back then. I hopped from friend group to friend group unsuccessfully in the 6th grade, because I wasn't sure of my place since all of my elementary school friends were changing, which meant our relationships changed too. I became more timid as the year went on, and I became an actual, real loner in the 7th grade, partly due to my shyness, but mainly because I was a weirdo. I was briefly bullied for a time. Two of the girls who used to tease me became my best friends in the 8th grade, but we never hung out outside of school and we lived with a sort of dark cloud over our heads all year because knew we were all going to different high schools. I started high school feeling scared of being alone again and feeling untethered to anything or anyone (which was GOOD! But still...). I don't really have anyone to talk to about those days. Those two or three friends I still have as friends on social media - well, it would be too weird to talk to them about it (yet). I don't talk to them regularly and I don't really want them to know I'm obsessing about middle school, which probably speaks to how I shouldn't really be thinking that much about it.
It also feels dream-like because I didn't keep good journals back then. I have a 7th grade journal and an 8th grade journal that I struggled to maintain because I felt like it was a chore since my life was so boring. I wish I had written all those boring things down now. I wish I had more confidence in my creativity back then. I wish I had a little more self-esteem. I still do.
So if I was lonely and sad and unsure of myself back then, why do I WANT to remember that specific time period? Why do I go back to songs that sometimes can remind me of that time in my life and how uncool I really was? That's something I can't really answer. Maybe they're just plain good songs regardless of what was going on in my life. Maybe they remind me not only of school but other, better things - driving around with my mom after school, watching MTV when I would come home from school,hearing those songs while shopping or at a fair.Maybe I take some sort of pleasure in feeling bad about myself. I know all of those things factor into it, but I want to say it's because they remind me of all those feelings that I used to have which let me know that those memories are real and I really lived through it, in absence of any documentation that lets me know for sure.
 |
| Not my profile, but mine probably looked something like this. |
High school feels like a dream, but in a different way. I had friends. We did teenager things together. I took pictures. Sure, I could've taken more. The main problem is that I didn't do much beyond taking pictures. I didn't keep a journal or a blog or anything - I stopped journaling because school and MySpace got my full attention. I was tired - I went to school, came home, browsed blogs for an hour, did a TON of homework since I was in honors and AP classes and then went online for the rest of the evening. It's hard to explain how important having an awesome MySpace page was if you weren't a high school student in the mid-2000s. I took that shit so seriously, because I thought the world was going to read it. I took deliberate care in every word and picture and song on my page. I was going to show you how cool I really was. My peers and I were constructing our own identities, which was a wonderful thing. But I never saved anything because the thought never occurred to me to do so. I never saved any of the hundreds of revisions to my "About Me" (that's not an exaggeration). I never downloaded my silly blog posts. I never kept a log of all my profile songs. I didn't think to save comments people made to my page or messages I sent to my best friends over some dumb teenage drama or my stupid answers to surveys that I would post as a bulletin to all my friends. I spent so much time on MySpace, constantly revising and rewriting who I was...never did I stop and think about archiving all that shit. It would be wonderful to have all that now so I could have a clearer picture of who I was back then. I didn't keep a notebook back then because MySpace functioned as one, in a weird way - it was an outlet for my creativity.
I started using Twitter nearly six years ago, towards the end of my junior year of high school, so I feel a bit grateful for being somewhat of an early adopter. I started using Facebook in my senior year, but I never put anything on there that I wasn't comfortable with the public potentially seeing (and I still don't!) so it didn't work in quite the same way MySpace did for me. I want to beat myself up for not journaling very much in the past five years but I have not only Twitter and Facebook updates to look back on but LOTS of digital files and photos PLUS physical things I've managed to hold onto like notebooks and doodles that I have saved which I could probably use to reconstruct the past five or six years of my life, day-by-day. There's probably been only a handful of days where I've left absolutely no digital trace. I'm sure we all can do that. Society has changed. Doing so would not the same as reading your deepest, darkest personal thoughts in a journal but at least you would know that you were doing...you were busy being you. And that's all I want to know sometimes. There's a comfort in that.
***
So much for not wanting to live in the past, right? By writing all of that, I've done exactly what I didn't want to do. Is there a distinction to be made between watching Hilary Duff videos and looking at old photos from my e-mail outbox that I forgot I had or are both activities just pointless and backwards and all the things I don't want to be? My answer, at least right now, is that there is a distinction. I want to find out who I was in order to construct my own personal narrative. I want to be in charge of my own life story as much as I possibly can. One of the ways I can do that is by digging into my past and collecting evidence and archiving what I can. I want to know that my life so far hasn't been completely pointless.
(OR MAYBE I CAN GO OUT AND START DOING SOMETHING THAT WOULD MAKE MY LIFE A LITTLE LESS POINTLESS. YOU CAN'T GO BACK. YOU CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING.)
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