Category: Overexposed: A Self-Love Project.

I am a woman dressed in fun, bright colors. The color of the flowers on my pants match the clips I have in my hair. My glasses are rainbow on the days where my wardrobe is feeling more monotone and black in order to add some color in my outfit. My side of the bedroom is filled with different patterns and waves of various complimentary colors; a huge stuffed animal sits on top of my desk and a gold, feathery boa sits on top of the signed K-pop albums of my all-time favorite boy group.

If you could only judge me from what my safe space felt like, you’d think I was a college student a best, or perhaps a high-school teenager whose just about to graduate.

Or, you would even joke around and say, “man, this feels like a grown ass woman who was a kid/teen in the 2000’s and never grew up from it…

… Hi, my name is Liz, and I am that person who was a kid/teen in the 2000’s whose style screams “millennial teen”.

I have this distinctive memory of watching my older sibling’s home video of their first birthday party at a McDonalds in South Brooklyn; the year is 1991. I, for sure, was not even a thought (as I was born four years after my sibling) but it was interesting to see what how most people in their late 20s/early 30s dressed and acted like. Many of these people wore what was in style of that time, but everything made them seem so much older than they were. No one was wearing crazy patterns and vivid colors, and their hair was styled in ways that added a couple of years onto these young adults. I mean, it seemed like back in the day everyone looked like they were their appropriate age; even older than what you thought.

Nowadays, it’s different. You have the millennials not really conforming to the adult norms that we grew up watching our parents be. Many of us are not mothers by the time we hit our 30s. Many of us are not married and if we are, we most likely got married at City Hall did not have a luxury wedding ceremony to celebrate love the way we saw adults do it. Many of us are still living at home with our parents for more complicated reasons than just “rent being too damn high.” It seems like a lot of the things our parents and our parents’ parents did are not what we are doing.

Millennials, in a nutshell, are growing up in an unconventional way. Although we are maturing and are now faced with more adult-like conflicts and situations, we are still into the things that we were in when we were younger. Maybe it’s the fact that a lot of us grew up wanting the things we liked but couldn’t get, so we now get them with our own money we made from our adult jobs.

For me, my 20s consisted of me collecting K-pop albums and photocards and calling it a collection. Once I started to make my own money, I wanted to do things with it that I couldn’t do in my younger years. I began dressing the way I wanted to dress and decorate my safe space the way I wanted to, and I’m always gravitating more towards the colorful, or “youthful” things. As I’ve gotten older, I feel like I’ve embraced more of this side and it’s not because I’m trying to “hold on” to my youth. I’ve grown to embrace the things I simply like whether or not they fit into the societal norms of what a 30-year-old should like. A part of discovering and defining what identity looked like on me was realizing that there is never a right way to do things, and there is never a set of interests and hobbies that you need to have taken away from you when you reach a certain age in life. To go full circle, I had to unlearn all these expectations that life has set you up for: you don’t need to leave color behind in your younger years, you don’t need to settle down and find love once you’re out of college and in your mid-20s (yes, I am talking about you 18-year-old Liz who thought we were going to be married by the time we turned 26), and most important of them all, you don’t have to feel guilty of not wanting to have children and become a mother even if biologically time is telling you that you should do so.

While others may judge our generation for being “immature” and not “growing up” fail to realize that our generation was raised in such a transformative time. We were not strictly born in the area of technology, but we also were not raised prior to technology becoming such a universal resource and everyday essential. Sure, we may have tons of diagnosed mental illnesses in our generation and lack the social skills that our parents and grandparents tend to have, but we are so self-aware and are able to self-identify what it is that we need to nourish our soul and our bodies that we simply do not care if society judges us for not being “adult enough” compared to generations before us. I’m talking to you too, my Gen Z readers; you may judge older generations for being a certain way until you one day grow up and realize that what we are telling you is pretty much the same shit that older generations told us…

“Don’t grow up too fast. Cherish your youth as each day you are one day older than the last.”

I am proud of us as a generation for the way we are growing into our adult lives. I am proud that we can cherish what our youth was and still embrace those parts into our adulthood. I am proud that we literally said “why grow up to be miserable and monotone when we can grow up and still be the same person?” I am proud that as a generation, we are bending the rules in what it means to be an adult, not because we are lazy or afraid to grow up, but because we want to be happy in a world where things get dark if you look at it for too long. We grew up watching the adults lose their spark as they got older; we simply do what our fate to be a repetition of that.

So, yes; call me weird and eccentric and colorful and comment about how when you were my age, adults did not behave in such way. Yes, look at me and laugh with your teenage friends and poke fun of the fact that I may not be wearing what is appropriate for an “adult in their middle age”. Yes, ask me why do I still like the things that you thought I should’ve now grown out of as an 30-year-old adult.

I am simply being myself is what I’ll say.

If you follow me on my personal account on Instagram, you will notice how unserious I am about posting on the platform. Sure, my pictures are edited to fit a certain vibe that I’m going for, but once you click on that highlighted circle around my profile picture, you will see just how stupid and silly I can be. One hour, I could post something relatable about my job; the next hour I could post myself blasting music in my house and dancing along to the song.

You could almost say that I am a completely different person on the internet. Not a catfish, but maybe like a personality catfish.

I say that because in person, I’m not as outgoing as I seem to be on social media. I am pretty reserved in person; I get nervous talking to people in general, I don’t say much when I’m in a crowd, and like any person with any level of social anxiety, I am constantly thinking about the things I shouldn’t do or say for the sake of people judging me or making fun of me.

It’s a very backwards ideology: to not give a shit about what people think or say on the internet when I’m being my authentic self versus being self-conscious in person because I’m afraid of people seeing me in a weird or negative light, right? Well, it’s much simpler than you think.

Hi, my name is Liz, and my own personal ‘boss battle’ of life is unapologetically being myself in real life.

For most of my 2os, I fought myself a ton when it came to finding my identity and embracing what it looked like on me. From being just a student to then being a person in society to being a a part of various online communities, I spent the last decade really trying to figure out what it was that I wanted out of life and for myself. Now just starting my 30s, I have a better idea on the things that feeds my soul ad what truly makes me happy as a person.

I know that I like my alone time. I like to be my own company, I like to take on projects by myself, and possibly the most odd thing of them all is that I prefer to go to events (like concerts) buy myself. I’ve accepted the fact that for the most part I am very introverted, but I also can’t help the fact that I tend to have these extroverted tendencies. What I mean by that is that at a party, I want to get up from my seat and dance to the music playing. When I’m in a circle of people that I am comfortable being in, I want to be more vocal and speak out in conversation. It’s like I am introverted by nature, but my personality is more extroverted.

I can’t help but feel insecure whenever I feel like my introverted side traps me inside this box. Am I a drag to be around because I don’t say much in conversation or if I’m terribly shy? Do people feel awkward around me when I feel awkward in a social setting? If I decide to do something that is outside of my normal introverted nature, will people looks at me differently or judge me for doing something they normally wouldn’t see me do? All these things roam around in my head whenever I am in a social setting, so I tend to force myself to be the version that society knows me as. Quiet. Shy. Let other people speak for me. Sometimes awkward as fuck.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I want to finally allow myself to be the person I am behind closed doors. I want to show people how funny I can be, how silly and random and carefree that I am while giving a shit that I may be weird or over the top. I think back to the girl I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s: Always outgoing and talking to everyone, being my true self and not caring about those poking fun at me and if they did, I addressed it. I think back to my younger self a lot when I think about my potential to be more outgoing in real life; I even look up to my childhood self for inspiration to do so.

I guess this is ultimately what I consider my video game “boss battle” of life. I still have to level up in my skills in order to enter this battle stage as ready as I can be. I still have all these side quests that need to be completed that will teach me new techniques and moves to use once I enter the boss battle. Yes, I will fail and yes, each heart I lose in the process will make me weary about even trying again afterwards, but with enough practice and understanding of the different levels, I will be able to finally get to that boss battle. In this sense, I still have to put myself out there in ways that will make me uncomfortable at first. I still have to try and fail and learn different ways to get past this belief that my authentic self is “too much” for people to see. I still have to challenge myself in smaller settings and give myself side tasks to accomplish in order to conquer the boss battle task. I will have tons of work to do in hopes that I will one day be okay with showing my extroverted side to other people outside of the internet.

I remember growing up watching The King of Queens on broadcast television because my family couldn’t afford cable. Doug and Carrie Heffernan (played by Kevin James and Leah Remini) live in a 3-bathroom house in Queens, New York in the late 1990’s into the early 2000’s. Towards the beginning of the series, there’s an episode where Carrie is dreading to be turning 30, as it’s deemed as “being washed out and old” and “one step closer to your grave”. Me, being an 11 year old with no sense of age or time, laughed and thought, “wow, I should be married and living in a house before I turn 30!”

Here I am, now 30-years-old myself, not being or having any of these things… oh, and hi; my name is Liz.

I knew I was not going to enter my 30s with all of these things that are deemed as adult milestones. For one, I had spent most of my twenties still trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do in life. I was exploring what my identity was after not truly having one in my early 20s. I was busy in college and then went straight into grad school without taking any breaks to explore who I was outside of being a student. By the time I was done with my studies, I was a 24-year-old woman just beginning to see what my place was in this society. To be quite frank; I was not anywhere near having my shit together by my mid-20s to enter my 30s with all these adult milestones.

Some people chose to get married and/or have kids in their 20s. Some people chose to go away for college and then moved away from home once they graduated. Some people moved out of their family’s house on their own, whether it was with friends they knew, their partner, or with a couple of random roommates. But, some people choose to go against these milestones due to many external factors. For me, I just had other plans for my adulthood.

I knew from a young age that children wasn’t going to be something I wanted for myself in adulthood. I didn’t (and still don’t) see myself being a mother, and as I got older the pressure of becoming one or “starting my own family” was now something others were concerned about for me. In all honesty; I still have that mindset that if anyone my age is having kids, it feels like it’s a teen pregnancy.

I know I am getting older and that my generation is now at that place in life that we’re getting married and we’re having kids and we are building our lives as we continue on our adulthood journeys. We get excited over the things that our parents got excited for like home decor and cleaning supplies. We’ve become those adults that roll their eyes at the teenagers commuting to and from school on public transportation. Also, we are now victims of our childhoods now being considered “vintage”.

The pressure of getting older, for me, is the constant reminder that while time waits for no one, you shouldn’t also jump into doing things because of how quickly time passes by. That sounds complicated, but in simpler terms; I am afraid that when I’m ready to hit these adult milestones it will be too late. For context; I am now that the age where the chances of having children begin to decline as I get older, but I cannot stay that children are in my current 5-year plan. I also cannot say that I’ll be living on my own anytime soon or be in a serious relationship that will lead to marriage; but I’ve learn that if these things are meant to be for me, they will happen when it’s time.

Going into my 30s, I worried about this time feeling like my “deadline” age, but now actually being 30, I feel differently. I feel like this is just the beginning of my adulthood. I feel like I am at the tutorial phase of a new game, learning the basic functions of what adulthood is like. As I get further into my 30s, I will take what I’m learning and apply that towards the rest of my adulthood, y’know? Life is honestly just a long play-through of a game, in my opinion.

I’m looking forward for all of the experiences I’m still left to have in my 30s. I am looking forward to travel to more places, attend more concerts, and continue to cross things off my bucket list. One piece of life advice I am taking from those older than me is simply to do everything I want to do before I decide to hit the adult milestones in my life. I like where I am currently; I feel like I am currently at the place where I’m learning who I am as an adult and what it looks like on me. I am currently building my professional career in higher education and taking opportunities as much as I can to further (and better) myself for the future. In the meantime, I am learning to balance my professional life and personal life by completely separating the two; work on projects and take on tasks at my job, but hit up a happy hour with my partner and his friends after work. I am learning to approach life in a “slow burn” type of way as a person whose mind is constantly on a race (that’s another blog post for another day).

For me, I’m taking turning 30 as being the first page of a new book in my life. I am leaving all of my baggage from my 20s in my 20s, and anything that challenged me or flawed me is now just a lesson that I’ve learned and experience that I’ve gained. For me, 30 is like meeting a new person: the other person doesn’t know anything that you’ve done, went through, or who you once were in your past; they only know the person that you are right now.

You read that right, readers. This topic doesn’t need a grandiose explanation.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I am the queen of blocking people on social media.

In this day and age, social media is such a major part of our lives, which means we need to work with it in a way that best suits our needs. Because of social media, I was able to partake in a couple of communities and engage with all sorts of people with the same interests as me. Because of social media, I am able to connect with people on such a low stakes level: as someone with social anxiety, I use social media as my “social blanket” to communicate with those I would not call my IRL friends. Also, social media has shown us in recent years (the pandemic ones) that it can hold space for different types of productivity, like remote work and remote learning.

But, we are all aware of the problem social media has created. It has become its own sort of reality. You can be one person in real life, but become a completely different person online and create this false narrative of yourself to appeal to others for likes and views. People assume the lives of people just by checking their social media posts and status, not realizing that we choose what we want people to see and we choose what type of audience we want to attract. Then there’s social media content creators and influencers, but this post is about your average Joe that just scrolls social media and shit.

Because of there being such a fine line between reality and “social media world”, the internet as a whole can be as toxic and damaging as any hardcore drug or alcohol out there. It can truly be a silent way to harm your mental health if you allow it to.

For years, I’ve allowed social media to take over by life because my presence was once solely online. I did not like to go outside, I was trying to see what social anxiety looked like on me, and I was trying to find my identity as a young adult. I thought as I got older and began to heal, these social media habits of mine would go away, like checking someone’s public page that I didn’t like or had a falling out with, being nosy and seeing the type of people they associate themselves with, and yes, creating my own narrative of these people to convince myself I was doing better without them.

Of course, these are my toxic traits too: being curious and nosy about things that really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t realize this until I stumbled upon something on social media that altered the way I behaved and treated people involved in this person’s life. Life lesson #5,183: Don’t snoop around for something if you are. Or ready to be confronted with that said-something.

That’s when I started to block everyone I did not want to see floating around on mutual friend’s profiles, your “People You May Know” section, and generally wanted to pretend they don’t exist in my world.

“But Liz, you’re 30 years old; only childish people block people on social media…”

No. Selfish people block people on social media; I am a selfish person.

I am selfish with the amount of access people have for me because not everyone was once in my life is deserving to see where I’m at now. That’s not me saying I’m the shit and all of that, that’s me saying that the people who once knew me as an older version of myself and has passed judgment towards my newer versions, then why should they have access to who am I now? Why should I let these people have viewing rights of photos that have documented my growth, achievements, and life if they have no interest in getting to know me or befriend the person I am now? I always say this as a joke, but this does have some truth behind it: “you wanna see what I’ve been up to? Read my blog.”

Blocking people on social media is the easiest part. Most of us block people in the height of our anger and do it to regain some control of the spiraling situation… but many of us tend to unblock just to look up these people and see what they’ve been up to since. I was one of them! After doing so for the umpteenth time since being on social media, I really had to sit back and ask myself if I was purposely setting myself up for failure or if I really wanted to fuck up my mood for the day. What good is this doing you, Liz? You know the adrenaline rush wears off once you get on that person’s page, but then what? Do you actually feel better in the end? The answer is no.

So yes; I am a selfish person. I am selfish with myself and the way I distribute myself to other people these days. I am not easily controllable or obtainable in the way I was when I was younger. I am not afraid to cut ties with people I feel no longer make me feel good or help me grow as a friend. I am not putting other people’s immediate needs before my own. I am not stripping myself of good mental health just so that I am looked at as being a “caring and thoughtful person”. Once you unlearn the negative connotation behind being “selfish” and what it truly means to be selfish, you’ll learn how to balance being there for your loved ones, but being there for yourself in the same way.

Do yourself a favor: block that person that’s hindering you from healing. I promise, you are doing the right thing.

POV: It’s the mid-to-late 2000’s and you’re entering your teenage years. Hormones are at their highest, and your perspective on love is based off of teen-romance movies and TV shows where everything almost works out for the girl who crushes on the guy… because he is also crushing on her back.

But what you don’t realize is that you’re an overweight teenager, and most (if not all) of these movies and TV shows are about people who are attractive to society standards. The fat girl or guy was always the sidekick, the best friend, the one who didn’t need a man or woman because media could not (and would not) depict a fat person falling in love with someone that didn’t screw them over or pity them as a joke.

So, you grow up thinking that no one can possibly like you for how you look or if they do like you, only like you because it’s some bet or prank they are playing; you know, like they do in those movies. All the boys you ever liked were always into skinny girls, or “socially acceptable plus-size” girls; if you had a hanging stomach and somewhat of a double chin, you did not qualify to be liked by other people in a romantic aspect.

As you get older, you learn that there are people that do like bigger girls; weight was just a number on a scale to some people and truly liked people for who they were as people on the inside. But now it’s too late; you grew up in the generation that taught us that fat people were incapable of finding love without their crush having interior motives, or having fetishes of being with a fat person. Of course, there is always a side of this insecurity with every body type, but for the sake of my experience, this is about what dating and love and relationships look like from a fat girl’s perspective.

Even when you found someone who loves your body for what it is and even when you start accepting yourself in the body you carry, you still feel this desire to have a body that looks socially acceptable. You wanted to know how it felt like to casually go out shopping in a store and find something “plus sized” that actually fits your plus-sized body. You wanted to know how it felt to follow the trends but literally couldn’t because everything that was your size was either out of style or meant for middle-aged women. At the end of the day, you just wanted to feel like your body was accepted, desired, and seen.

I was over 300 pounds going into gastric bypass surgery back in 2021 and did it to feel physically better. Of course, losing weight made me feel better mentally too, but as the months (and years) passed by, I began to question if the body I had now was even “good enough”. For awhile, I experienced some sort of body dysmorphia and not completely feeling like my body was even my own to claim and accept. In some instances, I began to compare my body now and the body I once has, comparing the differences in it.

“When you were bigger, you had a bigger butt and bigger boobs; something that you were once confident about. Now, your body sags from the excess skin, you’re flat-chested, and your butt is small.”

Such great self-love talk, huh?

I had to learn (and accept) that as a society, we aren’t ever going to feel like we’re good enough, yet alone enough. Growing up in the generation where being super skinny was in and celebrities were constantly encouraging viewers to join weight loss programs, it’s hard to feel like we have our place in society, even if it has more of a progressive perspective. Also, as a person who’s been fat her entire life, its hard to unlearn these ideologies about appearance and vanity.

So, the only thing you can do is fake it until you make it.

“Faking it Until You Make It” has always been one of those things that you were told to do in order to get to places you wanted to be. It didn’t mean that you had to fake who you were and the authenticity you have; you simply needed to act like you have the confidence to take on the tasks at hand. For example, your job. Maybe you lack the social skills to work in retail, but to get through the day meant you had to put on your “retail” voice and use the knowledge you have about your job to successfully interact with customers. In society, you have to act like you have the confidence in your style, personality, and appearance in order to feel accepted within society’s standards. You have to act like you are the shit, and you have to tell yourself that there is no one else just like you in the universe because you have style, personality and an appearance that is uniquely yours. Once you feel like you are bending the standards society has set, you stop caring about what other people think of you and you start to not engage in negative self-talk as much as you used to.

This mindset doesn’t come easy, and there are still days that I feel like I was “prettier” when I was bigger. Being one thing for the majority of your life, it’s hard to not compare the last couple of years where I lost all this weight and be mentally confident in my image. This mindset challenged the things I believed me and the type of behaviors I indulged in because of my mental health; I legit had to treat my toxic traits like an external person, handling it the way I would with external beings. That’s a different story for a different day.

POV: You’re now in your 30’s, learning to love yourself in the ways you should have when you were younger, and because of that, you make it your life’s mission to nurture the various young versions of yourself, because you know that all versions of you deserve to have felt loved even when society told you you were not worthy of it.

I hear it from older generations all the time; people these days do not know how to socialize the way that they did when they were our age. I agree with them even though they are talking about my generation and the one after mine. I can’t speak for Gen Z, but I can say that for us millennials, we were on the right track of knowing how to socialize; that was until the internet and social media blew up. I can remember being a young teenager having to make the effort to pick up the landline phone and speak over the phone if I wanted to talk to my friends. I had to actually make plans verbally with people and let them know this is where we were meeting up because once we left our house, we had no way to get in contact with our friends. I can honestly say that when I was younger, I felt like I was on the right track of being a social butterfly; these days not so much.

Do I blame the internet and social media for my demise of being social? No. For me, my lack of social skills stems from a place of trauma and only dealing with it way after it actually affected my skills and ability to be social. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not this person that just sits at their computer all day and writes other people’s stories because mine is too boring to tell. I still interact with tons of people and able to speak to people (sometimes, when I’m feeling confident) but for me as a person, I find myself being the best version of myself when I am in my own company, being my own best friend.

Hi, my name is Liz, and socially I’m alone, but I am not a lonely person. Does that make sense? Lemme explain.

I guess this topic is coming up from me because this time last year, I lost the only friend group I had since probably being back in high school. Yes, this friend group were consisted of people I never met in person and that I met online through a community, but it didn’t change the fact that I shared a ton of my life with these people and considered them just as much as my friends I would have in-person. Losing that friend group completely made me question a ton of stuff about myself and who I was as a person. Why was I so quick to cut people out of my lives when something like this could’ve been discussed and avoided? This seems to be the question that a lot of people who are social and have tons of friends would ask those who tend to cut ties quickly, and they are right; how come it is so easy for us these days to cut ties with people that we put our trust and care into when one thing goes wrong? Why is it so hard for us to sit down and have these difficult conversations with those we love when they hurt us or if we hurt them?

I can’t speak for anyone else when I say this, but for me I would talk things out with people in situations that I knew needed to end right then and there. I used to hoarder people in my life to the point that eventually I learned that it hurt me more to hold on than to let go in the end. For me, once I began practicing self-worth and assertiveness, I lost my ability to have these tough conversations with people, and at the end of the it all, I was back to square one.

Our generation specifically have been smothered in this idea that you are the best version of yourself when you make decisions that benefit your well being. It’s not a stupid ideology; we are the generation that began to have these conversations about mental health and just how important it was to take care of it. But, we have took that ideology to the extremes when it comes to interacting with other people, whether it be romantic or platonic.

Losing a friend group as an adult is so different than losing one as a teenager. As an adult, there’s no one fighting for your friendship the way we did as teens and as an adult, no one has the time to sit back and reflect how their actions may have affected you. We’re too busy living life as full-grown adults, trying to make it day by day in it. So when we cut people out of our lives due to anger and emotional distress, we don’t realize that these temporary feelings lead to permanent decisions. Then we end up alone.

So, am I going on this tangent because I regret my decision of cutting ties with my friends in my past? No. I made the best decision that I thought was best in the heat of the moment, when I was crying in my break room at the job on an emergency therapy appointment because I felt incapable of continuing my day. Everyone has their reasons of why they cut ties with people, but at the end of the day, we have to realize that if we aren’t able to be our own company, sit in our own thoughts, and learn how to be our own damn best friend, reconsider your options.

For me, I am used to be alone socially. I don’t have friends I see every weekend and go out with. I don’t have friends to vent to when I am feeling angry or depressed about a situation. I cannot name 5 people that I consider my friends that I can confidently say that if I were to ever get married, would be a part of my bridal party. is it sad? Of course. Someone in their 30s should have a solid group of people they see or talk to regularly, but for me it’s not a priority because, well, I am the best version of myself when I’m by myself.

“Oh, but that must be a lonely feeling to constantly have.”

I am not lonely. I have family that I live with and talk to every single day. I have coworkers I see five days a week and talk to when we get the chance. I have acquaintances that will comment and reply to a story on social media, sparking up conversation. I have a pretty awesome partner that I get to laugh and have fun with. I have my creativity and my writing universes that nurture me as a person. I have myself.

And that’s okay with me.

For most of my twenties, I had carried trauma from events that happened when I was a teenager. It’s no surprise that in the seven years I’ve been writing for the blog, I spoke about this trauma to acknowledge it, accept it, and to diffuse the energy that I allowed for it to carry. Within this last decade, I’ve sat down with my therapist to talk about the events in detail and identify the triggers so that when they arise, I don’t allow it to affect me as it usually does. This work took years for me to finally accept it for what it was and to ultimately forgive myself for the role I played in this event. It wasn’t until later in life that I decided to forgive those who contributed to my trauma; not because I actually forgave them, but because I need to move on and, yet again, diffuse the energy it held. I finally allowed myself to let that trauma go and not let it affect how i lived my life back in 2021.

I was finally free from ever experiencing another ‘traumaversary’; you know, the time of year when the traumatic event happened. Mine were in January and in May; it felt good to take back the positive energy of my birthday month and what was once my favorite month of the year because the weather was at it’s best this time of year.

That was, until February 2023 came around and gave me some new traumaversaries; back to back in the same week.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I am currently going through my 1st-year traumaversary. It is notable that the first year is the most challenging.

The thing about having a traumaversary is that it is sort of like a holiday; you don’t really think about it until the time of year comes around. After moving forward from that situation, I went about my life and made 2023 one of the best years I’ve had in recent date. I entered 2024 knowing that this time of year would come again and I would be brought back to thinking about my trauma in ways that normally would not trigger me. For example, I went for my usual coffee talk and put a random playlist on shuffle. I skipped a couple of songs until this one particular song began to play, and I was immediately taken back to red hair and bleach-eyebrow Liz, sitting on my bed crying my eyes out and singing along. The lyrics to the song talk about being heartbroken and wanting nothing more than to erase the memories away by destroying yourself in the process. I immediately skipped it, not being able to handle listening to the song.

This song was one of my top played songs of 2023.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that trauma resurfaces in ways that you’re not always ready for, no matter how long its been since going through that traumatic experience or how much progress you’ve made in healing from that trauma. Trauma isn’t linear, and you never really know when or how it will resurface itself; for me, it’s always around the time of year that the event happened. During that time of year, I am extra cautious when it comes to my mental health and my overall well-being.

I am reminded that I’ve come a long way since experiencing that trauma. I make sure to let myself know that I did what I needed to do for myself in order to move forward and begin the process of healing. Since then, I’ve learned so much about my needs and what type of interactions with people I wanted to have. I’ve learned how to be my own best friend by taking myself out to shows and concerts and give myself the same love and care I would give to others. I’ve learned that I also need to have boundaries with myself because I am not perfect nor am I excluded from having the toxic traits that I don’t allow others to have around me. Although I am able to move on with my life and learn from these unfortunate events, it still doesn’t make these anniversaries any easier, especially if they are from recent.

For me, I am taking care of my mental health by doing some self care; in this case, it’s writing a lot. Writing helps me diffuse that energy that these events still carry, and talking about them out loud instead of allowing it to circulate in my mind until the time passes. I know that in this time, I will mourn the loss of the person I was prior to this traumatic experience, and yes, I will sink into this rabbit hole and think to myself, “I was so different before everything happened; life was so different.” It’s normal to mourn the losses that these events caused, and it’s completely okay to miss the people involved and the person you were, but you have to remind yourself why you chose to make the decisions you made and again, remind yourself that the progress you made since experiencing any trauma is worth acknowledging.

At the end of the day, your traumaversary will pass, and you will make it to see another day, week, and year. Just be gentle with yourself.

Back when I was a bookseller, I didn’t understand the work ethic of my assistant manager.

Our workplace had opinions on how she worked and interacted with her staff. She wasn’t a horrible person to interact with, but I would always tell myself and those around me “if she was a bookseller, I think we’d all get along with her better. As the assistant manager though…” We all, to some extent, agreed on this statement.

We were all a pretty young group; we were the new generation of store managers and booksellers after a long reign of notable booksellers and managers. We were swarmed with faculty and administrators looking for the old store managers and hoping that they would “fulfill this request” like they would have in the past.

I was the oldest in our group of booksellers. I was 25; a year out of grad school just trying to get some work experience so that I was able to move forward with what I really wanted to do down the line: help students on the college level. Those around me were fresh out of college or just starting college, looking to get a job either on campus so that they were able to attend their classes before and after work, or those that lived within 15 minutes of the college. After me was my manager, who was 27 at the time that I started my job at the bookstore. To be 27 and run an entire campus bookstore? That took balls to do. Although she was young, she was professional and felt wiser beyond her age, and she was older than all of us so of course we showed some respect.

Our assistant manager came in during the first day of classes, or what was “rush” for us. “Rush” was the first week of classes that we were the busiest. We all thought she was just another bookseller being added to our team, until we were told she was our assistant manager.

Later in the months to come, we found out that she was just 20 years old, making her the second youngest amongst us all.

Back then, I didn’t understand why she worked the way she did. I didn’t understand how someone knew what they were talking about, but had a hard time communicating that to us. I didn’t understand why she managed us so drastically different than how our store manager did.

I didn’t understand how someone that was one of the youngest in our workplace even have enough experience to get into a managerial-level position until I did.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I am the youngest person in my office in a managerial-level position with only 2 years of experience under my belt.

I sometimes wonder if my old assistant manager felt this constant pressure of being older in the workplace. You should dress like this and you should talk like that and you should present yourself in a way where you look like you know what you’re talking about. You think that you have to act like you’re older because you had an encounter where a student thought you were a student and didn’t believe anything you were saying to them. You think that you have to change your language and code-switch to a more professional-sounding voice; using “I am following up with an inquiry you addressed per your last email” instead of “I’m reaching out about that request you sent in your last email.” You think that you have to be this person that is older beyond your years, without realizing that your youth brings something special and new to the table.

Instead, you are slammed by faculty, administrators, and former students whose age is way past the mid-life crisis phase for sounding “too young”, therefore “not knowing what I’m talking about”. You start to wonder if you’re even worth of the position you’re in because of these various factors. You develop some extreme imposter syndrome, deeming anyone and everyone who’s older and wiser than you a better fit.

In higher education, I’ve learned that these things I’m feeling are very apparent and visible to those who experience it. Those who work in it work in the field until retirement. They make connections with each other in different departments, trusting each other with their work and are constantly doing favors for one another due to the fact that they worked together on making a situation right. Being new and young in higher education makes it hard to gain that with other people, and people are not willing to trust newcomers that they don’t know or haven’t ever heard of before.

They deem you as new, they deem you as entry level, and they deem you as incompetent of sharing information and being correct about that information. She’s young; she can’t possibly know what I’m talking about. I’ll ask *insert someone older than me* instead. Being young in a workplace that has notably older than your generation makes you feel all the things you think others are projecting onto you: you’re too young to be in the position you’re in, so you have to constantly prove yourself.

Prove that you’re knowledgeable, wise, and competent, while trying to maintain your youth.

At my desk in my very-big-girl-job are stuffed animals that once lived in my room growing up, and crochet chicks that I did over the winter break. I have two Care Bear plushies with my cats pictures on them. I had a Kpop themed 2023 calendar, and still have Victon’s Seungsik calendar on my desk. I currently have Valentine’s day hearts hanging from the rim of my desk. I am known to unapologetically be myself in a setting that can suck the fun out of things. In everyday life, I am the things I place on my desk; bright, colorful, and festive, so why must I dim my light to fit the standards of working in a professional setting? Why can’t we be ourselves and be professional? Why can’t we be wise, smart, professional and young? Why must I sacrifice my youth when in all reality, my generation of professionals are going to be the ones running the same offices in 10, 20 years from now? Why can’t we use our youth as a way to relate to our students; to make them understand that we are not all ancient and dusty and detached from reality?

Why must I feel like the only reason I experience impostor syndrome isn’t because I think I don’t do my job well or don’t know what I’m doing in this position, but because of my age? When are we going to stop believing that we aren’t worthy of our place in professional settings because of our age? I know that this feeling will pass one day. I know that I will one day feel like I’m worthy of my place in my career as I grow more into this role. I know down the line, I will see people even younger than me in positions like my own, and I hope to one day meet them and ask them if they feel the same way as I do.

Nothing that I do professionally is ever conventional. In a field of scholars with PhDs and accolades under their belts, I was able to publish my first ever article in an academic journal at the age of 27; something only those with experience and education do and be taken seriously. This time around, I am in a position that most people tend to have later in their 30s/early 40s. I guess this is just something that I do.

And maybe, that just says something about me and my work ethic.