A Loud Argument with My Tween Self!

When I was 12 years old, I was really annoying. I thought that angst and taking selfies in black and white were the ultimate cool. I would use any excuse to yell at someone about their misogyny. I was obsessed with identity labels, and the list of things I hated was longer than the list of things I liked. Looking back on my 12 year-old self’s memories, texts, and photos, my whole body cringes in disgust at the person I used to be. My gut instinct is to tear my past self to pieces: scribble over old stories, delete every Snapchat-filtered selfie, lecture my past self on nuance in political views, teach her what an online echo chamber is, and renounce every obnoxious thing I’ve ever done. Yet none of this is beneficial for my growth. Every cringey thing I said and every horrible outfit I wore was a necessary step to becoming who I am today.

Along with the majority of our generation, I attempt to erase my past as much as possible. While this is a normal part of growth and development for all generations, access to social media, old photo albums, and a general excess of digital archives makes confronting our younger selves unavoidable. However, as we spend energy separating ourselves from the past—focusing on regret rather than growth—the tentative nature of our current selves is forgotten; we raise our current selves to a pedestal in comparison to our past selves. Along the way, we lose sight of all the potential we have to grow.

But, alas, during the pandemic, most of us were chronically online and left our digital mark during what feels like our cringiest era. For me, that meant arguing about politics online from a relatively far-left perspective that lacked any nuance and a complete understanding of political views. I spent hours consumed by various political and identity labels, debating about social justice as if I were leading a true revolution and arguing with anyone who even slightly disagreed with me. While identifying labels have their time and place, I put queer labels at the center of discussion—a mentality that was toxic and all-consuming.

Coming out of the pandemic, during most of eighth and ninth grade, I began to reevaluate my information sources and political expression. I found nuance and complexity in real-life conversations with people from different parts of the world. I began reading nonfiction books and articles that offered a range of perspectives and allowed my understanding and opinions to expand. 

In my attempt to change, the detestment of my younger self led to different challenges. I began to disconnect myself from the rest of the queer community; I did anything to avoid being all-consumed by labels like my younger self was. As a conscious effort to blend in and feel “normal,” I began to internalize the very homophobia that only a few years ago I had so passionately fought against. But, it was also an attempt to block out a part of myself I associated with immaturity. For me, the angry regret at my younger self meant a swing of the pendulum past the productive line of nuance and toward less productive internalized misogyny and homophobia.

None of this changed what my younger self believed, said, or did. In resisting the small box my younger self locked herself in, I locked myself in yet another, different but small box. Only this past summer, after a serious bout of introspection and reevaluation of my evolving perspectives, did I begin to understand this. While abroad, two friends from religious backgrounds came out to me and were lost on where to go, what to do, and who they wanted to be. I began to value and be grateful for my previous experiences in queer-centered spaces; they allowed me to picture a future for myself and support others who weren’t as fortunate in learning to do the same.  

It's developmentally normal for tweens to take on one-sided views and explore their identity as they navigate through the overflow of information online. Being loud and obnoxious with my feminist views helped me find my voice and strength in my girlhood. Now, in 10th grade, I’m able to confidently stand up for myself and those around me. My experience is far from unique; in fact, these experiences are fundamentally inevitable in terms of human psychology. Neuroplasticity is responsible for the lifelong fluidity and fluctuations of the human brain in terms of overall function, perception, neuron ability, and various systems. While trauma, intense physical or mental exercise, and other distinct occurrences can cause immediate or direct shifts in brain wiring, neuroplasticity also discusses the inevitable, constant changes in behavior throughout life. On a cellular level, the neurons and particles that make up our brain shift in function and arrangement over time as we grow. While neuroplasticity is always occurring, it’s especially pronounced during childhood, as the brain doesn’t fully develop until 25 years old. My shifts—and all of our shifts—in perception, understanding, and identity haven’t been random; they’ve simply shifted along with the fluctuations of the brain’s functions. 

All of us, as part of our history’s most overstimulated generation, are especially susceptible to trendy, cringey phases through the content we consume, in addition to the inevitable shifts in how our brain works over time. Trying to deny this shift or cover up past versions of oneself is pointless. Not only will it not change the fact that past selves contribute to who we are, but to work against this shift in the past also means working against the growth of our current selves. Only when we accept our past selves for who we were can we continue to grow into the people we will eventually become. 

Indeed, I may stumble upon this article when I’m at my dream college living a super-cool-college-kid life and cringe at these very lines, but I hope that I won’t avoid cringing. I hope that I will use the cringe as fuel to grow rather than to marinate in regret.