Born Late, Still Ate - by Faye🥀

I’ve never held a VHS tape in my life but somehow, I know exactly how it sounds when it’s placed into a VCR. I know the metallic sound the cassette makes once it drops into position and the high pitched “whirrrr” sound that echoes when the loading polls pull the tape out. I’ve gotten all this information second hand. Just the way you know a distant relative from stories your parents tell you but not well enough to have actually met them. I was born towards the late 2000s, which means I basically grew up in the era of iPhones and the internet. But if you ask me which decade actually raised me, I’d say the 19s and the early 2000s. And honestly? It wouldn’t even be lie. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/IMG_5862.jpeg" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;"/>You see this photo? The room there isn’t even mine but I’ve created one just like that in my head. In that room, I have lots of tapes stacked all the way to the ceiling. I have a camcorder and limited edition of Bratz Dolls my mum gifted me for my 19th birthday. The walls are covered with posters of Brittney Spears, Beyoncé and Tupac Shakur and I’m listening to Toy Soldiers by Eminem on the radio. Then there’s me, dressed in a tank top and baggy jeans with hoop earnings drawing attention to my newly made cornrows. I’ve mentally furnished a decade I never existed in. And I’m not sure I ever want to leave. I found my 2000s in an unexpected way. Not from my sibling’s hand-me-downs or tales by moonlight. I found it in grainy looking old movies that I wasn’t alive to see. I found it in songs that were released before I took my first breath. And in clothes that makes me feel like….me.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/IMG_5908.jpeg"/> If you open my wardrobe, you’d see y2k before seeing me. Baggy jeans, low-rise pants, baby tees and shirts that look like they could swallow me whole. The kind of clothes that look like I got them from a store in 2003. You’d never find short shorts in your line of sight or whatever this generation have decided looks flattering or appealing. I don’t dress my age. Heck, I don’t even dress my decade but it feels just right. Few months ago, I was able to get my hands on a Polaroid. I took the picture this year. Same me, same face, same room and everything. I sent it to a friend and he ran it through an app, and turned into an old picture. It looked washed out. Grainy. Like something that has been sitting in my bottom drawer for twenty years. I looked at that picture and felt a strange kind of belonging. It wasn’t that I looked prettier. It was just that I looked like the version of me I would have actually liked. One I would have developed some sort of self love for. I don’t know how to explain what the present feels like without sounding ungrateful. I’m really not. I have family and friends. I have a life. Most definitely not the best life but a life nonetheless. But there’s a way this decade asks all of us to live. It asks us to be optimized, to be documented, to always be aware of the camera. I’ve never been able to breathe here. I’ve feel like an intruder in my own life. I suffer the imposter syndrome everyday like someone that wandered into a party they weren’t invited to and everyone can tell. But the past? The music? The clothes? The lifestyle? The way songs could be songs without becoming content? The grainy looking selfies?All of it feels like me. Not a version of me I’m desperately trying to become. The one I already am. And let’s face it. Who needs a 4k selfie anyway?<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/IMG_5861.jpeg"/>

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