Last year, I saw a ghost at my friend’s wedding—and I had a panic attack so unrelenting that I had to take off my Spanx and hide them in a vase. It wasn’t a literal ghost, obviously; it was a sweet girl named Annie who used to sit next to me in our A-level psychology class. I’ve spent most of my adult life running away from my teenage self, and for a while, this was easy: before Annie materialised in front of me, I hadn’t bumped into anyone from school for more than 10 years.
Like a lot of, let’s be frank, now, nerds, I moved from a small town to a big city in my early 20s and finally felt able to thrive. I didn’t so much disown my former self as murder her, taking solace in the claim that all the cells in our bodies are replaced every seven years (“so you’re literally not the same person you once were!”). I obsessively forged a path forward and refused to look back—like Don Draper, if his secret was that no one voted for him when he ran for head girl.
I’m being facetious. I wouldn’t mind my past so much if I’d just been uncool, but unfortunately, as well as being cringe, I was also fairly thoughtless and cruel. Panic flooded my body when I saw Annie, in that moment, not because I was scared of her, but because I was scared of the version of me that lived in her head. Did she remember me as mean? Funny? Freaky? Embarrassing? I wasn’t sure, because like all teenagers, I was once all of those things, often at the same time.
But because life has its ways, shortly after my Annie-induced panic attack, I had to reconnect with my teen self—for work. I was writing my debut children’s book, Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveler, and decided to look at my own teen diaries and photos for inspiration. Looking over them, I came to realise something. While I’m haunted by the ways I hurt people as an adolescent, I have to shake away my shame of being cringe. After all, that didn’t hurt anyone but me.
Snapshots of cringe come back to me in the middle of the night. Ironically wearing a Justin Bieber T-shirt to collect my A-level results, but then getting my photo taken for the paper. (I was being ironic, even if it’s unclear exactly how.) Losing my front tooth after biting into some hard Russian bread (please pause to process) and then wearing a fake one attached to a retainer for a year and hoping no one would notice, even though I [redacted] my [redacted] with it in my mouth. Pretending to snort powdered skimmed milk by the river. Posting poems to MySpace. Gluing a rice cake to my arm and taking a picture of it for Facebook? Donning a thin turquoise headband with a bow on it for a dance.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
