Hi there,
Long time no chat. Time slipped away again. I remember when I used to come home and write a blog post every evening after high school like clockwork. It became a part of my routine, just like exercising or brushing my teeth.
Creating content for Instagram and TikTok has taken the space that used to be for this blog. It's hard to believe when I started this back in 2009, Instagram didn't even exist yet. Facebook was just gaining traction, Tumblr was taking off after its inception in 2007. TikTok wouldn't be a thing for another seven years. Everyone blogged: it's just what you did.
Tonight I watched this video on 2010s Tumblr aesthetics. It was so fascinating to watch the trends I lived through and embraced now become dissected in Youtube videos. Is this how the older generations have always felt about the younger ones wearing vintage? I get the anguish now.
Watching the video threw me down a rabbit hole of nostalgia. So many internet friends (many I still follow) and internet-famous bloggers I worshiped at the time (still kinda do) popped up as examples for ten of the definable aesthetics to come out of the Tumblr era.
If I could go back to any time, it would be then. Not necessarily for where I was in life (college wasn't anything to write home about) but the way we dressed and consumed fashion. Although fast fashion existed and there were trends, there weren't so many moving so fast like now. I also miss the style tribes that helped you feel like you belonged. Trends would exist within so many sub-aesthetics, each being tailored and trimmed to fit the individuals within their own tribe. The items themselves, whether infinity scarves or hi-lo skirts were simply the building blocks in which personal style and expression were launched.
Maybe I'm romanticizing it all too much. That's what our brain does, anyway. It takes all the bad and pushes it to the corners of our mind so it can remember the good. But it all just feels...so far away now. With how social media has taken off, it feels like the road of no return. How do we ever go back to the way it was? To even before what that was. Millennials are nostalgia gluttons because we had some of the last childhoods before the internet. Even that feels out of touch from this lifetime.
Maybe it's all too personal for me. I peaked in this time period of the internet, I'll be the first to admit that. They were my glory days of Modcloth Style gallery and Chictopia; skater skirts and Peter Pan collars; blunt bangs and MAC's Rebel. A long, but not so long, time ago.
Maybe I'm just burnt out. Longing for a slower pace of...everything. The trends, the social platforms, the fashion, the ins and the outs. I do this to myself, creating little videos for the internet, like it's important and not a made up world on a little screen that doesn't even really exist. If I'm being honest with myself, this burn out goes so much deeper than the clothes, but how I'm existing in this life. That's what bothers me. How I used to be able to sit down and concentrate on one thing at a time with full intention, like a blog post, and now I can hardly stand to not watch YouTube while I'm creating a TikTok video and texting my boyfriend all at once.
This need for something slower, the reason I came back to the blog last year, still exists. I haven't found my stride in it yet. I'm still in the system, this system of constant input and output. Sometimes, I forget what it's like to just sit in the silence of my thoughts. I feel my hand twitch, yearning to reach for the phone I just put down. Maybe something happened. Maybe something changed. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe I need to learn how to be still again.
With much love,
Lauren
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