unsupervised access to the internet as a child + neglect = taste
an observation on the disappearance of childhood
i was a weird kid.
not in the sense that i was socially awkward or had trouble blending into social settings. i was abnormally self aware, culturally obsessed, and pretentious.
pretentious sounds bad. but it’s true. I didn’t feel aligned with most people within my age group. i credit this definitive trait to my upbringing.
somewhere on the internet i read:
unsupervised access to the internet as a child + neglect = taste
although it’s funny— the formula rings true.
i spent every free moment from ages 5-17 utterly obsessed with consuming media & art.
my boyfriend teases that i really, really, like tv. he doesn’t share this affliction. where i could waste days on a series, he appreciates the (healthy) routine of watching an episode or 2 a night.
i had a tv in my bedroom since kindergarten (now 4 years clean 🧼) my moms box set of pbs specials were my bedtime story. at 7, i would stay up to watch nick at night because i thought the jokes were funnier. at 9, saturday night live was a weekly ritual I still covet.
in my tween years, my best friend and I would watch every teen drama on abc family. i will never forget the hours I spent sitting on my bed staring up at aria montgomery, with the home phone by my side, my best friend on speaker:
“ok mine just cut to commercial… on the count of 3, press play!”
tv will forever occupy a space in my heart. my favorite sitcoms have gotten me through heartbreak, life changes, and deep depression. elaine benes filled a role model shaped hole in me.
to clarify, this is not a wah, wah, wah, poor me, my parents didn’t read me bedtime stories wah, wah, wah. they did their best and i love them.
if television was a gateway drug, youtube + tumblr was discovering heroin. the golden age of the internet was cosmically aligned with those, all-too-formative tween-aged years.
i had seemingly discovered the world through music, fashion, art, and film. i was quickly engulfed with head spinning intensity. however, i’m not special and this is a shared experience. i know this, because of tumblr. where i, along with millions of of other kids shared this phenomenon.
youtube was an encyclopedia. alexa chung videos taught me what it meant to be beautiful. in the texas suburbs, in my own little room, the world got bigger and bigger with every passing minute spent reading, watching, and listening. the unfettered access to the wider world was, no doubt, a catalyst towards growing up just a bit too fast.
in neil postman’s, the disappearance of childhood, the concept of childhood is a social artifact that has come in and out of normalcy throughout history. he claims the concept of childhood originated with literacy and the printing press, and since then the segregation between adulthood and childhood has blurred with the “deification of technology”. specifically, television has eliminated the divide through its undifferentiated access to imagery rather than using literacy to limit audiences according to age or development.
it’s safe to say we have collectively experienced this change both pre and post-pandemic. what it means to have a childhood has evolved into something that was not possible 10 years ago.
it wasn’t all bad. it was the first time in my life i felt genuine interest and that interest has stuck with me, evolving into the frame of who i am now. i have a defined sense of self. although it’s ever-changing, i feel comfort in knowing that i understand myself on a deeper level, even if it came from growing up too fast and being critically self aware.
i developed a culture-based view of purpose and this made me a strange kid. with this, childhood’s carefree nature began to fade. it felt similar to discovering santa claus wasn’t real, but also like i knew a secret my peers didn’t. episodes of later with jools holland played on repeat, i knew music. i know what it looks like outside of our dear bubble.
becoming hyper aware of the existence of “childhood” caused me to wonder why mine felt different than others. i wondered if it had already ended and if i had done it correctly. years later, it’s easier for me to analyze this part of myself.
i am not “better” because my childhood ended earlier than my peers. perhaps it made me more artistic or more independent. i was able to disconnect from my hometown with greater ease than those who still struggle with leaving home.
i used self-education through media to soothe the internal anxiety i felt about missing out on that bigger world. i moved to new york as fast as humanly possible, and i will continue to do whatever it takes to ensure i never have to feel that anxiety again. this doesn’t make me better, just different. i know a lot of you feel the same way.
the other day, while my boyfriend made us dinner, i turned on one of my old playlists from 2014, for nostalgia sake. teen idle by marina and the diamonds played while we drank red wine. i told him about how i remember crying to this song in my room at 12, laughing about how dramatic i was as a tween.
this wasn’t a unique emotional reaction for me. movies like frances ha, the royal tenenbaums, rushmore, and uptown girls filled me with such a dramatic amount of emotion— sadness, anxiety, excitement, yearning. it was panic inducing, but the kind of panic that fires those synapses and burns those core emotions into your brain and soul. as a teen, i cried to those films, songs, and shows as if i was grieving a life i had lived and would never be able to return to.
my father promised me a trip to new york at 13, so i got the grades, did the chores, and nagged until the tickets were booked. i was ecstatic. we stayed in a friends apartment on the upper west side. i snuck out to the firescape and drank a lukewarm beer in my urban outfitters combat boots with freshly bleached hair. I felt so jessa johansson, it was great.
on our last day, while walking through the village on my own, i had an anxiety attack. that feeling was there again, the stomach turning anxiety, excitement, deep dread, and panic. catastrophizing thoughts spun in my head. what will happen to me if i don’t live here? how will i go on knowing that the world is happening around me and i’m not there to see it happen? i can’t do it. how will i afford it?
i’ve spent years trying to understand that emotional reaction, where it came from, and what it means.
i watched capote’s, breakfast at tiffany’s (1961), for the first time last night. i hadn’t finished writing this yet. the timing was impeccable.
i saw bits of myself within her, i saw bits of my boyfriend within paul. holly runs from that same feeling, although here she dubs them “the mean reds”. it’s not until she forces herself to accept reality and to stop running from herself, her past, that she is able to feel comfort in setting roots in a person, rather than a place.
hey.. i’m from texas too, lula mae. i have also run from those roots, holly. i know the mean reds all too well. is it a sect of imposter syndrome? do we question the merit of a life that is so starkly different from our upbringing? do we feel shame and guilt for wanting something more?
i don’t know how to fix that feeling, nor can i figure out where it comes from.
when met with the sort of reflection questions that could send me into a spiral: i consider the facts.
“the mean reds” have died down quite a bit since entering adulthood, although they’ve shape shifted into a different sort of feeling. maybe i’ll call it the unknown purples.
moving helps, but love and support help much more.
running is (almost) never the answer.
how do you eat an elephant? one bite at a time.
two drifters, off to see the world, there's such a lot of world to see. we're after the same rainbow's end, waitin' 'round the bend.