Thread by @HeyChelseaTroy

I grew up through this in the '90s & 2000s. I went with my mom to the Y to elliptical for an hr/day. ~Half my dinners in high school were Lean Cuisine.

But I'm not here to talk about that (the article does it better than I could).

I want to talk about...
getpocket.com/explore/item/t…

...how WEIRD it is when trauma and nostalgia mix.

See, I didn't have the greatest school experience. For a number of reasons outside the control of my well-meaning parents, I went to seven schools between K5 and 12th grade. This meant that in addition to all the...

NORMAL struggles of making friends as a kid, ADDITIONALLY every 2 years or so my hard work on that got wiped, I showed up a stranger at another school, and I started all over.

This was one of maybe 3 things that contributed to me waiting till I was almost 25 to come out, btw

By the end I gave up on making friends at school because with each switch, the kids had known each other for longer and were cliquier.

The last school I went to, I focused EXCLUSIVELY on academics and getting into college. I even BEGGED the athletics dept to let me...

...break the rules and join a sports team OUTSIDE the school because the kids were more welcoming on the city rowing team.

(Recently a classmate from there said to me 'you were a bit of a try-hard.' Yeah; unlike making friends, making A's was not a Sisyphean task there.)

ANYWAY, during that period, much like grades, my weight was 'a thing I could control' (according to Seventeen magazine).

To this day, sitting down in front of the TV with a Lean Cuisine is, like, a nostalgic activity. It reminds me of watching Project Runway with my mom in HS.

I still count calories. I don't mean to—I just know how many I've consumed in a day the way the Thaayorre know what direction they're facing.

I don't MORALIZE calories like I used to. But counting them doesn't, like, bother me the way it probably should.

piecubed.co.uk/my-southwest-l…

There are LOTS of things from this period that I remember fondly. I was as excited about #whenwewereyoungfestival as everybody until I found out who is producing it. I still wear chokers. Checkerboard crap. Chains. Side bangs! (Screenshot from @rubyconf talk)

But now I also get to have more fun with these things that were big 15 years ago because now I'm out, and I have friends, and I make my own money, and I'm 7 years into a sport that effectively fixed my food/body issues, and I've been to a whole lot of therapy since high school.

I find myself wondering whether part of nostalgia, at least for me, is "lemme go back and enjoy all the things I wasn't really set up to enjoy when I maybe would have liked to" because now I can disambiguate the cultural assets* from the trauma.

*I will not be taking questions on whether chokers, checkerboard, and side bangs are cultural assets at this time

I kinda suspect it's this way for a lot of folks who grew up in the closet and it probably extends to other axes of marginalization as well.

But I think we see some of that in appreciation for bygone decades, too.

Magazines that do pinup spreads in the fashion of the '40s that are explicit in their criticism of the systemic misogyny, overt white supremacy, and rampant homophobia of the time

Insta accounts that celebrate the joie de vivre of the '70s while acknowledging that the prosperity of the era prepared Boomers really poorly to be stewards of the future and, welp, *gestures wildly at everything*

It feels like we're starting to see that for the '90s/'00s, too.

Maybe part of it is this sense of relief we get from knowing that some of the ways we're messed up now weren't precisely our faults; there are whole articles about why we are this way

Idk; I'm also not an ethnographer. I might just be making up lies 🤷‍♀️