In the early 2000s, we didn't have a phone to stare into, we didn't have other human beings' photographs, videos, and teenage self-analysis to bounce off of. We just had ourselves, alone in our rooms, or our friends, at school or after school, or our parents, our teachers, maybe T.V. or later, we had MySpace, which didn't take much time at all and didn't involve any scrolling movements whatsoever. Just some rudimentary coding, through HTML programming language. Most millennials learned this, as teenagers.
Instead, we stared into our mirrors, into AIM instant messenger with people that we knew from school, or maybe creepy strangers that we met on Neopets. We had books about stories, about puberty, about adolescent suffering. We had our parents gossip to overhear, and our dear siblings if we were lucky enough to have any.
We had our mirrors, and in this case, a camera. We had our own minds to think and think and think. We drew, we wrote, we cried, we experienced physical pain. But scrolling wasn't invented yet. So instead, we dyed our hair, we wrote stupid (or good) songs, we scrawled in journals, both pink and fuzzy or hard black-bound covers. We pulled out strings of grass from random people's lawns. We long-boarded down hills. We screamed at each other in someone's mom's garage. But before that, we were still so young and just we're inside, alone, in our rooms.
I remember catching lizards when we lived in the outskirts of Petaluma, California. I remember my fascination with their movements. I remember talking with them, even though I was like, 95% certain that reptiles don't understand human speech. I remember sitting alone, bored, wishing my friends could come over but we all had homework. I remember waiting until my brother was done doing something random to hang out with him. I remember being so bored that I would volunteer to help him with his homework from 3rd grade, but also because I adored him and he was the only other kid living in the boringness of our house.
When the cousins visited from Redding, and Santa Barbara, and Cleveland, we would all make up the stupidest and most fun games that we could fathom. We were all almost teenagers, give or take a few years, and in junior high school, middle school, or the oldest in their first few years of being real teenagers in 9th and 10th grade. We would make up songs, and braid each others hair. We would cackle laughing and fall over, and dig our feet into the dirt just for something to do. We would style each others clothes, and tie our shirts in knots and make up stories about other kids from school. We would lecture our cousins from Cleveland about California, although Redding vs. Santa Barbara vs. the Bay Area were almost more different from one another than Cleveland from anything else.
I kept looking through pictures and started to cry. Maybe this is a millennial thing. Maybe it's about parents, or about going crazy later. Maybe it's about missing my baby brother, or missing my cousins, or the photos of me cutting our maternal grandmothers hair before she died.
Maybe just saying hello to that little girl, that 12 year old artist who was already devastated by the world but also didn't know the horrors that awaited her at 19, is more than enough. Maybe the antidote to the psychiatric trauma is to see these photos taken by invasive lenses and, like in the portrait above, sometimes even taken my by own gentle-eyed view of myself, for myself and eventually the world. We had no where to look outside of our families and our homes, outside of our siblings (if we were lucky,) our cousins, and our grandparents, dead or alive.
Luckily, we had no where to be seen, either. No one to tell us converse weren't cool (they were) other than other little kids that we knew, face to face, at school. Life wasn't easier, but it also wasn't harder. It wasn't happier, but it also wasn't sadder. It was just more real, more contained, more physically represented, and more present. Present within our bodies, ourselves, our eyes, and our families. Even in the most thralling sorrow, or most searing of emotional and physical pain, we didn't have to step outside into a virtual land of scrolling in order to, as young teenagers, know that we were alive.
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