My sophomore year of high school was rough.
Without getting too too personal, it was a difficult transition. I was halfway done with my 7-12 prep school which necessitated a change in campus. I went from being a top dog ninth grader who had a handle on social and academic pressures to being a bottom-of-the-food-chain tenth grader who was struggling in pretty much every subject and felt utterly lost in the social landscape of high school. I have never (read: NEVER) been popular, but freshman year I at least felt like I had a foothold. Tenth grade it was like all the process I'd made completely evaporated. Plus, my older brother went off to college, and it was the first time in my life that my family situation had experienced any upheaval since my little brother's birth ten years prior. I was shaken.
The summer before that school year, a few of my friends stumbled on YouTube vloggers, specifically attractive, college-aged, British boys. I knew what YouTube was back then, but it never really registered with me outside of watching covers of my favorite songs. During the summer of 2012, I not only found Vlogbrothers (John and Hank Green's YouTube channel), but also Jack and Finn Harries, Dan Howell, Marcus Butler, and a whole slew of others. Most of them hailed from the UK, though there were a few from Australia, I think, and South Africa. They were three to five years older than us but barely looked it. They had endearing accents. They made silly skits and answered viewer questions and doled out vague platitudes on Twitter about how all their viewers were beautiful and special, even though we were fifteen and utterly unremarkable and there were millions of us.
The infatuation with these boys lasted all through my sophomore year. I rejoined Tumblr with renewed vigor, I watched their videos every time a new one was uploaded, I posted pictures and GIFs of them on Twitter and on my friends' Facebook walls. We play-fought over who would get to marry who, over which of them we were most like, over which (identical) Harries twin was hotter (you'd think it was Jack but then you'd mature and realize it was Finn. It was the hair. Don't ask). In hindsight, part of my social alienation could probably be attributed to this obsession. The "cool" girls had real boyfriends and real social lives. I had YouTube. I had Tumblr. I had imaginary relationships with boys an ocean away. We could never fight. We could never break up.
When junior year rolled around, I regained some footing (and some sanity). I made new friends, I joined more activities, I got refocused on schoolwork because My God It Got Real. Sure, my YouTube boyfriends could never break up with me, but I definitely dumped them. I stayed subscribed out of laziness, but I watched their videos less and less, until all at once, I wasn't watching them at all. I unfollowed them on Tumblr and Twitter to improve my ratios. I fell out of the loop on their lives.
I grew up.
Recently I've been having a bit of a nostalgia renaissance (what a phrase). I've been looking at old Facebook posts and old tweets, cringing at my past self and the things I thought would make me seem funny and cool on the Internet. In that vein, I decided to rewatch some of the videos that brought me so much comfort in my younger and more vulnerable years. The main thing I noticed is how young these boys look! At 20, I'm now the same age as they were when I watched them, if not a bit older. I found a Jacksgap video from 2011, which would make the twins 18, and they look like absolute babies, younger than the boys at my university. It's hilarious to me that when I was 15, they seemed like mysterious older men. They were kids. They were trying to find themselves or get attention or some combination of the two. They didn't know any more about the world than I did. The other thing that strikes me is how the videos were kind of...stupid? I thought they were so quirky and witty at the time, but now it all seems so trite and embarrassing. I always assumed that their target audience would have been people their own age, but now it's clear that their demographic was always just a bit behind them. The socially awkward 19-year-old boy seems "adorkable" to the 14-year-old girl who doesn't know any better. Ah, how I was misled.
And yet.
I miss being misled. I miss being a lost 15-year-old. Being a lost 20-year-old is harder. The stakes are higher. Sure, I still live in my hometown of Los Angeles and my parents are always just a phone call or excruciating freeway ride away, but a lot of my consolation has to come from within. The questions I'm dealing with aren't about where I'll go to college or if I'll ever get asked to a dance or how to find the area under a parabola (I've already forgotten all the math I know). I'm figuring out how to get people to pay for and pay attention to the words and music I write, how to forge healthy romantic relationships, whether or not I'm brave enough to live my dream of traveling the world in my 20s, what my role is in the confusing, chaotic terror of the American political landscape. I'm defining womanhood and blackness for myself. And if I achieve the visibility I'm hoping for, I'll be the role model to the teenage girls just a few steps behind me, trying to get a glimpse of What Could Be.
Coming of age on the Internet is a crazy thing. We're the first generation to do it. Our adulthood will be defined by what online fads and jokes we were a part of and which ones we elected to skip. The idols of our generation aren't just musicians and actors, they're the YouTube and Twitter famous. We are the most depressed, anxious, dryly funny, politically engaged, socially conscious generation in human history. We are unprecedented. Which, of course, makes the future sort of terrifying. Yes, at times I wish I could go back to 2012, to unironically (then ironically) saying #YOLO, listening to the hip new pop song "Call Me Maybe," to when the worst thing that a presidential candidate said during a debate was that he had binders full of women. But it's 2017, kids, almost 2018. The Internet babies are voting and buying liquor and going to war. We're graduating and falling in love (for real) and running for office.
There's so much ahead of us. It'd be a shame if we spent so much time looking back that we missed it.
