EMILY YOON / DALY NEXUS

I often think about my high-school self: avid lover of Holly Warburton paintings and musical theater, writer of prose and poetry and a girl with a rebellious streak convinced, in true teenager fashion, that nobody understands her. And I think about the ways current me and her beliefs and patterns and expectations are in diametrical opposition to those of former me. I think about how I still have yet to change in ways that surprise both former me and current me. Per the lyrics of a Mitski song that I used to love, “I’ve been big and small / And big and small / And big and small again.” I am in constant movement headed toward a destination, but I am also a being in constant flux, like a comet or something. 

And, like Lorde (who I love just as much, if not more, as I did in my teenage years) asked in a recent Instagram caption, I ponder a question: “Is teen you proud of future you?” 

I’m here in my hometown, which is, as per usual, why former me is on my mind. These are her stomping grounds; I’m just passing through. When I’m here I slip back into old habits: I don’t cook. I gossip at my favorite Greek restaurant with my best friends. I overthink things I cannot unsay.

I write a lot when I’m back home, and I think about writing. When I’m at college, I worry about whether I write well. But when I’m home, I worry about whether I’m a great writer. 

I can only really sit down and write reflectively like this in my childhood bedroom, where the spirit of former me, the die-hard Sofia Greenwald fan, still lives and writes. I’ve tried to write at college

in coffee shops and my apartment and the office, and I can never slip into the recesses of introspection. Something or someone is always distracting me; I can only access the past in facts and not feelings. 

Here, the past and the emotions that it contains — alternately desolate and blissful, suffocating and expansive  — are the molecules that make up the air, for better or worse. It’s like Lucy Dacus says in “Hot & Heavy,” the opening track on “Home Video” (an album instrumental in defining my high school experience): “Couldn’t look away even if I wanted / Try to walk away but I come back to the start.” 

Greenwald (whose name I have changed for the sake of this article) is who I, in my high school years, considered a truly great writer. She went to my high school and she also wrote for the newspaper, but our times with the program never overlapped. She is three or four years older than me and, according to LinkedIn, is now pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing. She does not know who I am or how often I pored over her old articles in my first period journalism class and wished I could write like her, enigmatic and wise beyond her years and very likely the United States’ next poet laureate. I wished I had the passion and patience to write about things like city council meetings and the suburban teenage experience instead of taking the easy way out and writing lighthearted student features and listicles about things to do in quarantine. 

In hindsight, I know that “becoming a great writer like Sofia Greenwald” is a silly and arbitrary bar to set for myself, especially considering that I only know who Greenwald is from seeing her name on the bylines of old articles. But greatness cannot happen when there is nothing to strive for, and if your guiding light is a girl that you never met that you can only assume is the coolest, most intelligent human alive, then what the hell, sure. 

Former me looks for guiding lights everywhere. It’s because she’s scared of the inevitable. She fears drifting away from and outgrowing people close to her. She looks through my camera roll and notices absences. She asks about them, and I can provide some answers, but others I don’t even know myself. I tell her to trust her intuition when it comes to choosing friends, to listen with a cautious ear. But simultaneously, I urge her not to devalue relationships that she has a gut feeling will drift away. There is still so much to learn from people you won’t always know. 

Former me is likely upset that I do more editing than writing these days, but she is proud of the other things I have accomplished in my time at college thus far. She is happy that, by and large, I live a life that I am very deeply happy with. I tell her that we have incredible new friends that we love doing life with. We have wonderful old friends who remind us how lucky we are to have people to experience change with. We have a family that loves us very much even though we drive each other crazy. We have great memories to look back on and so much to look forward to. 

Perhaps former me envies my current life, counting down the days until she’s free from the watchful eyes of her parents, until the happy days outnumber the bittersweet ones, until her accomplishments can speak for themselves. But if I had the chance, I’d let former me know that I’m proud of her, too: her idealistic big heart, great music taste and boundless creativity. 

I’d tell her that we still aren’t Greenwald, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We love being us: the duality of the starry-eyed, anxious former me and the reflective and grounded current me. And, hopefully, a kick-ass and wildly successful future me is reading this right now and writing a follow-up — letting current me know that she’s proud of me and that we’re right where we need to be. 

Emily Yoon is applying for a PhD in remembering.

A version of this article appeared on p. 14 of the January 23, 2024 print edition of the Daily Nexus.

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