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why I keep thinking about 2006

(from my Substack newsletter, Molly's Love Letter)

Someone once said that being 10 years old is the peak of our lives, that it doesn’t get better than that. I can’t remember who said this—Darren Aronofsky? Truman Capote?—but I have found there is some real truth to it. I tried to look it up and couldn’t find it, but I did find this relevant Capote quote:

“Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge to childhood and walk across it.”

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. This runaway train of thought was fueled in part by The Artist’s Way: Week 3, which asked me to note my favorite childhood toy (dolls), game (dress-up, monkey bars), and foods (Walker’s prawn cocktail crisps and paté sandwiches (?!)). And then there were my artist’s dates spent reading old issues of Teen Vogue and remembering not only cultural trivia, but also certain cultural��and personal—moods.

When I was 10, I was in 6th grade. The year was 2006. I spent my evenings rooting for Paris Bennett on American Idol and then trying to get Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” out of my head. There was also “Promiscuous” and “SexyBack,” and Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” and the premieres of Hannah Montana and Ugly Betty…

This month, to harness my tweenage nostalgia, I rewatched a 2007 episode of Gossip Girl and listened to 2006 Britpop and Ameripop albums like Lily Allen’s Alright, Still and Fergie’s The Duchess. Each of these cultural artifacts was like a portal into a world I had not truly thought about for at least a decade.

As I dug into all these sentimental pieces of media, I started thinking more about who I was when I was younger—someone free-spirited, enthusiastic, imaginative, goofy, eccentric, whimsical. Someone who wrote freely on my garage-sale typewriter about orphans and spies and talking cows and overweight cats doing ballet. I didn’t overthink or question my writing or compare it to that of Joan Didion or even think about other people reading it at all. I was in my own little world, playing, for the joy of it.

Cut to a decade later: After taking a semester-long writing workshop in Chicago at age 19, I stopped writing fiction. Since then, another decade has passed—one spent writing primarily for other people, lifestyle features for medical websites and branded content for luxury liquor labels.

More and more throughout this decade, I have been wondering why I’ve had creative-writer’s block for 10-plus years, when I used to spend hours a day playing make-believe through my writing. While thinking about this recently, I thought about how I had gone through puberty and internalized a narrow idea of who I “should” be in order to be “cool” or attractive. I realized there was some truthful connection between the loss of my childhood creativity and my adolescent foray into the world of hormones and vodka and boys and Skins. As I moved into my teens, writing weird, whimsical stories—or made-up stories at all—started to seem childish to me, or delusional somehow. I found myself spending less time in my vivid imagination and more in my (self-)conscious mind. This self-consciousness stifled my ability to play.

Not to get all Peter Pan Syndrome and start rambling about the Good Old Days and how “when you grow up you lose your wings” or whatever—referencing, of course, these quotes from J.M. Barrie’s Victorian-era plays and novels:

“Why can’t you fly now, Mother?” “Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the way.” “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”

It’s just that, as someone who prides myself on my elephantine memory, I was alarmed by how much of the stuff I used to wholeheartedly love I hadn’t given much thought to in almost two decades. And the reason I hadn’t thought about it was because somewhere along the way I deemed it “uncool,” or else not in alignment with a certain identity I had created for myself. Said identity may have been more digestible to whatever dude I was crushing on or dating at the time or to strangers on social media or to my own ego, but it was a dilution and a flattening and a boxing-in of who I was. I denied myself the complexity of being a full human being who can love both Ariana Grande and Tom Waits, both Gossip Girl and Twin Peaks, both Teen Vogue and Tolstoy.

The result of this self-denial was that it not only obscured my true self from the people around me, but it obscured me from myself. I think that’s what growing up can do to a lot of us: We start trying to define and explain and justify ourselves to the world. We start to compartmentalize things, to label them as “babyish” or “basic” or “nerdy” or “girly” or whatever else. This hides parts of us in the shadows, and keeps us from being free and expressive and whole.The Olsen twins: Style icons then and now.

Sure, 2006 wasn’t a wholly wholesome time. Toxic trends (Perez Hilton, fat shaming) ran rampant. But the Internet had a simpler and less central role in the culture then: Facebook wasn’t made available to the public until that September; iPhones weren’t launched until the following June; and YouTube revolved—at least in my own consciousness—around silly videos like Charlie the Unicorn, Fred Figglehorn, and “Shoes. Oh my God, shoes.” Today, most of the content I see on YouTube comes from lifestyle vloggers pushing products or podcasters preaching self-optimization strategies. Teen Vogue has gone digital and political. Hyper-“connection” has made us more individualistic and censorious as a society. Culture, not just age, has made the world feel heavier.Blake Lively and Leighton Meester in Gossip Girl (2007)

So why am I thinking about that time so much? Why am I watching The O.C. and reading back issues of Teen Vogue and listening to tracks produced by Timbaland? It’s because doing so reminds me in small but mighty ways of who I was—who I am—beyond any self-consciousness about projecting a certain curated, “correct,” and clear-cut image to the world. It’s fun to look back and feel 10 years old again. It reclaims the parts of me I had rejected for being too corny or cheesy or geeky or goofy. It builds that bridge Capote wrote about, the one back to childlike wonder and creativity.

A lot has changed within and around me since 2006. And one day I’m sure I’ll be looking back at 2024 through this same wistful, rosy haze. But today, I look at and listen to these cultural relics with the same ears and eyes I did 18 years ago, and I am reminded what it felt like to be free, to express rather than impress, to explore and play with wonder and delight. Thinking about 2006 reminds me how to fly. ♡

(from my Substack newsletter, Molly's Love Letter)

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