The Tamesis
Joan Didion wrote in Our Friends: “I think we are better off continuing to deal with people from our past, whether or not we find them attractive companions.” Slouching towards Bethlehem. However, one might say that the current trend of posting photos from 2016 on the Internet is taking Didion’s advice a little too far.
Anyway, that’s how I felt in the beginning, watching my timeline fill up with people’s selfies from ten years ago and party photos from the year Prince died, hamilton The craze is here, and the biggest controversy in pop culture is all-female Ghostbusters Restart. Like any good Millennial, I was overcome with cringe-worthy nostalgia (are we? real Do you need so many boy eyebrows? ), but I feel absolutely disgusted with posting any photos of myself. When I look back at them, this reason sticks out to me. I spent that year right out of college unsubtly starving myself in an attempt to make it big in Los Angeles while actually diverting the vast majority of my time and energy to eating as little as possible and exercising as much as possible.
I’ve been writing about my experiences with eating disorders for years, but aside from a brief chapter on the subject in my book, I haven’t actually spent much time reflecting on 2016. I thought and wrote a lot about the compulsive bulimia that came later, but until I had the therapy-derived language to express why I did it, allowing myself to be constantly hungry was obviously painful.
When I look back at photos from 2016, I see someone I barely recognize. Scroll through photos of me on the beach with friends, at a dance party in Echo Park, at the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, and the most striking thing about all of them to me is the emptiness in my eyes that I don’t think I imagined. (Actually, that’s not true: My collarbone also sticks out, and so do the tendons in my arms.) Even though I’m incredibly lucky to be who I am today—fat and happy; Recovering from an eating disorder; surrounded by a circle of loving friends and family – the most heart-wrenching thing about revisiting these photos is that while I was putting myself down so much, a significant portion of the world valued me so much, all because I was so thin.
I wish I could find joy and even humor in my photos from 2016 like so many of my friends did, but what I did was yes Breaking away from the retro trends of 2016 is a new empathy with the Emma of ten years ago. Even though I’ve grown up a bit, stopped starving and punishing myself, gotten the right medication, and stopped letting the meanest voices in my head dictate my life, I still feel a little disgusted with my 22 and 23 year old self. The idea is something like: Girl, you’re certainly not Lena Dunham yet. No one is truly happy in their early twenties. Get on Abilify; start eating protein, carbs, and fat three times a day; and add women to your Tinder. Everything will be fine.
Now, though, I try to be a little gentle with my version of myself because I feel so strongly that I’m wasting everything I have because I’m not getting thinner, more successful, more popular, just…More. Well, from now on, I choose to honor the part of me that feels like she has to shrink herself in order to expand her life in the way she desperately wants—because, in Didion’s mind, how can I move on without a polite nod? She deserves at least that much.
