I was born in the nineties, just barely, but I never really experienced the nineties. And certainly not the in US. But in my mind, the nineties have this air to them, a color, almost, a tinge of blue and purple and always darker, more real. People milling about in colorful Nike tracksuits, saying what was really on their mind, really living.
It’s Mean Girls, the old one, where the popular girl is pretty but not perfect, and all the girls look different, there is no vanilla. And I live in Mean Girls, the new one, where I couldn’t pick out the actresses from a lineup because they all look the same to me, filled lips and foundation’ed cheeks, the only differences are in the carefully chosen racial diversity of the cast. Yes, I’m using Mean Girls to show this, because I had never watched it, and watched both last week, and now I can’t stop feeling some sort of loss at the twenty years elapsed between the two versions.
But this is an essay about Dave Eggers, not Mean Girls.
I am not finished with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, am only halfway through, but reading it makes me feel things, things I maybe felt when I was a kid, maybe never felt at all but clearly remember feeling.
There is the sense that the real world is out there, that if I step outside, there is life and situations and people. And the people are different, weird, weird-but-not-creepy, weird-but-not-autistic. But when I try to step out there, when I walk outside, looking for them, I cringe at the flatness, the continual sameness of everyone I run into, everyone I know, really I’m cringing at myself, who has become so bland so intentionally over so many years.
There is the sense that I am young, that there is youth that doesn’t really know what’s going on but is feeling, is feeling all the things, but it’s not just the anger of the protests that we keep hearing about. No, there’s an adventurousness to it, a deep belief in the youth’s ability to do things, to change things, to actually right the wrongs instead of just complaining about them. I felt so much of that when I was a teenager, and now it feels gone, what could I really ever do anyway.
But I’ve robbed myself of the belief that anything I do matters, I’ve robbed myself of the things that made me different, stand out, weird. I’m so terrified of saying the wrong thing, of getting caught out, but even deeper, of being a bad guy, of being someone who doesn’t care, who is mean, who is not good and unworthy of love. I’ve convinced myself that vanilla is safest, and that really there are only a handful of others flavors for me to choose from anyways, a small cast that I could go for but that would basically feel the same. I would never say this, it would ruin the vanilla, I’d only be filled with shame if I ever said, I am white and I am a man and I am straight, so really it’s not worth stepping out of line and toeing that line between weird and wrong, between myself and being an unworthy.
I want something, someone to blame, as is always the case with these things. By now, I’ve painted nostalgia over a decade I never even knew, so surely the culprits must be the things that came into being afterwards. It’s the fault of the internet, for overloading my senses. Social media, for forcing everyone to look the same. Cancel culture, for punishing any deviation.
But really, it’s obvious, it’s always obvious, the fault is only my own. My own and that of all the others, just like me, who were afraid to live, to be in the real world, to be the real world. I read Dave Eggers and he makes me feel that it’s ok for me to believe in cliches, that the cliche this time is just a question: what would I do if I was not afraid?