Lately when I’ve been opening TikTok, all of the content I see are people younger than me lip-syncing to songs that I grew up listening to, and it makes me feel so weird. Ever since I have accepted the fact that I’m almost 20 years old now (yikes) and my childhood is eventually going to become something that today’s youth are nostalgic for (double yikes), it’s still jarring to me. When my mom used to talk about how 90s fashion and music becoming trendy again makes her feel old, I would laugh and tell her “Everything old is new again.” The 90s were only thirty years ago! Am I becoming old now that I am 20? I guess I should start considering myself an Internet senior citizen considering that I can vividly remember the times these TikToks are nostalgic for.
I was that stereotypical emo kid in middle school. Twenty One Pilots t-shirts, black leggings, rubber bracelets from Hot Topic all the way up my arms, shoddy box-dyed hair, and questionable makeup skills are all something I choose not to remember wearing. I see the TikToks titled something like “2016 Aesthetic” and it actually makes me cringe because I probably have photos of myself wearing those outfits somewhere on my very old Tumblr page that I have since forgotten the password of. Yet somehow people want to bring this era of emo cringe back. At least I wasn’t 18 in 2016 or else I’d definitely have a Panic! At The Disco tattoo somewhere. That certainly wouldn’t have aged well.
It’s very comical to me that the people who would typically bully me in middle school for being THAT emo kid are now posting videos about how they miss the 2016 emo-core aesthetic. Weren’t you the ones saying questionable things that could possibly ruin your life if I repeated them in this article here to me 8 years ago? Yeah, I miss the 2016 emo revival too, but I was at least part of it when it happened. I’m not trying to gatekeep being a Tumblr kid, but it bothers me when people I KNOW would call me weird for dressing differently and start acting like they’ve always liked that aesthetic. Maybe they were just projecting insecurities onto me, but it still stings me even to this day to remember just how cruel some of my peers were about my stylistic choices.
In a way, I’m glad that everything “old,” even if it was only 8 years ago, is becoming new again. My emo phase which I never quite left (but became less annoying about) helped me figure out what makes me feel comfortable as a person. The sign of getting older makes me feel sad but also happy that the things I used to enjoy make a new generation of kids comfortable too.