FORMATIVE REALITY

I don’t like where I stand.
In the world
In the complex scheme of things
In my life
In my age group
In my head
In my birthday
In my skin
In my early twenties
In my mindset
In my conditions
sandwiched between generations,
sandwiched between having a legitimate story of where you were on 9/11 and viral TikTok dances.

It was the early 2000s. I grew up around 9/11. I was in preschool on that day, at a Mother’s Day Out adjacent to a Lutheran church. Right after my mom dropped me off, she heard on the car radio that the Twin Towers fell. I often asked my parents what actually happened on 9/11 a few years later. It still haunted me and was still fresh in the American climate. The slow progress of cleaning up the debris at Ground Zero was everywhere to be heard and known. It took almost ten years. I grew up with the rise of Patriotism and the sudden country music upheaval. The (Dixie) Chicks and Alan Jackson were favorites in our house (I still love the Chicks!). Some of my elementary school assignments were to write letters to soldiers in Iraq during the holiday season. 

But we were still in an economic boom. The culture of the nineties still lived on. Lisa Frank lived on. Limited Too lived on. Tamagotchis lived on. Butterfly clips and scrunchies lived on. Chokers, über thin eyebrows, chunky heeled loafers, gravelly post-grunge bands, and prep school fashion lived on. Friends was at peak airing and popularity. Most of the kids TV shows of the late nineties were still airing. VHS tapes and cassettes were at their last days. CDs saw their golden age. Computer games such as Super Solitaire and 3D Space Pinball were the rage. Dial-up Internet lived on a bit too. (Fun fact, I was completely terrified of computers early on, likely because of dial-up. I would hide under desks in pre-k and kindergarten because it scared me so much. The sound still haunts me today.)

I am the “baby” of my mom’s side of the family. I have a cousin the same age as me, but I come “behind” him by three months. My older cousins had MySpace profiles, and I thought it was so cool. MySpace was still around in 2010, but declining quickly. Facebook was the new “cool” site to be on. I had created my Facebook profile in 2010, now ten years ago (that feels a little weird, LOL). I was in seventh grade. If you wanted to be “popular” in some sort, you HAD to have a Facebook page. No emojis, no face-perfecting filters, no Snapchat, no Instagram, and definitely no TikTok and lip-syncing superstars. Apps quickly rose and fell. You never knew which ones would last.

I didn’t grow up in the nineties. I was born in the nineties. Sometimes I feel a little guilty about being born in, but not having the complete set of the nineties childhood, of which thirty-somethings avidly talk about. It’s almost if I, as well as roughly 1993 to 1999 babies, were given “the best of the 1990s” compilation CD. We got a lot of the nineties, but we weren’t the children of the nineties. We were the babies of the nineties – and the children of the early 2000s – a 7-year era of which so many forget existed.

My first legitimate memory was from the summer of 2000. I was two years old. My dad had passed away when I was six months old, in September 1998. My mom was dating my stepdad at the time, and we were burying some of my Daddy’s ashes in his favorite place: the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico. My twin sister, Sara, and I were happily skipping down the mountainside with our mom. Out of the blue I felt some really hard “rain” falling from the sky, penetrating my little body. I was so scared. I knew it wasn’t rain falling down. I covered my ears and face and ran down the mountainside until we got to our blue-grey 1998 Toyota Sienna, parked in a small lot on the mountain. The first time I ever experienced hail. 

I didn’t grow up as a pragmatic, scaredy-cat, post-recession kid either. I was a junior high adolescent at the time. It was a thrilling excitement for our country to see an African-American President be elected (African-American was politically correct in 2008, “black” was widely considered as “racist” language to those who were not of deep skin ethnicities). I had thought racism was a thing of the past (and now I feel terrible about having carried that worldview as a child, because #BLACKLIVESMATTER!!!!!!!!!!!). During my senior year of high school, that view changed from my past-peak-wave Millennial point of view.  I wasn’t aware that these blankets underneath our soil still existed, as well as most of our large-spanning Heroic generation. It’s as if the world turned up underneath my feet.

The main point of this post is that I am someone who sees the undercurrents of the way people think and why they believe certain ideas. I am authentically true to my own life experiences, not letting Bureaucratic marketing strategies brainwash my childhood and adolescent climates by transporting me to Gen Z, of which I cannot forcibly be made to understand for myself. I’m not cashing my checks into a false idea for someone my age. I feel sad that more and more people my age are cashing their checks into Gen Z because that’s what the Internet says, and they believe it because Authority made this distinction “official.” I feel a bit manipulated. As someone born in the late 1990s, the eternal confusion is real. It bothers me so much.