He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness
for the decade we were born in.
— Thomas Pynchon

I did it: in a covid induced haze, a flock of cartoon blue birds tugged at my heartstrings and bewitched me into purchasing a nostalgic rabbit hole by the name of Disney+. (It should be noted: I have no ardent childlike yearning for spinning teacups or giant plastic castles. As a child I liked Disney movies enough, and my family owned a modest number of them on VHS; but, beyond that, my most vivid Disney related memory is of better-off middle school girls judging my family for only being able to afford to take me to one Disney park for one day—which was more than enough for me, even then.) However, contrary to my initial intentions for purchasing the streaming service, I found myself not in the realm of technicolor classics like Alice in Wonderland, or The Jungle Book, but back in the 90s with Cory Matthews and Shawn Hunter.

Alone, in the dark, on a Tuesday at 3 a.m., I stared at the Boy Meets World cover photo of a grinning Shawn and Cory, looking like they were barely fifteen years old, and realized that all of Gen Z’s recent criticisms of millennials—that we’re all fervent gatekeepers of 90s pop culture who can’t accept that we’re aging—are true. (The most millennial thing that I wanted in that moment was for the entire cast of Boy Meets World to remain exactly as they were, in that photo, for forever; and I felt desperately homesick over the reality that they hadn’t.)

I watched as Shawn Hunter searched for some permanent sense of identity and home, in almost every episode, and found myself at the precipice of a slippery slope; struck by nostalgia for things that I hadn’t thought about in years, marveling at how everything we forget really is imbedded in the subconscious, always ready to resurface with stunning clarity at the right trigger.

It wasn’t long before I realized that the 90s are the template for so many of my dying adolescent fantasies. (Ever since Titanic, I have been waiting for a crumpled up note to be slipped into my hand; for the boy untethered by wealth and social convention to meet me by the clock with an undeniable proposition: “So, you wanna go to a real party?” I have experienced every burning bridge as if it were the closing scene of Cruel Intentions; with my blonde hair blowing in the wind, just like Reese Witherspoon’s did as she escaped life as she knew it—with her dead boyfriend’s Jaguar—and Bittersweet Symphony wailed, as if it were a source of great shame and pride: “I can change.”)

I re-visited 90s alt rock; listened as Third Eye Blind sang about existential crises, like: “I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend.” And I wondered why so many 90s songs sounded like being stuck at a perpetual graduation ceremony—like some manic form of purgatory. (Please see: Good Riddance, Closing Time, Save Tonight, et al.) I wondered: Why are all the farewells in 90s songs so urgent—was everyone unconsciously preparing for the end of a millennium?

I wouldn’t know, because—having been born in 1992—I wasn’t ever cognizant enough to adequately experience the 90s. Therefore, in my memory, they’re even more dazzling from abstraction, a secret era that my older sisters escaped to every time they crowned themselves with butterfly hair clips and slipped out the side door. (I tried to live vicariously through my oldest sister: I’d steal her Walkman and listen to Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn on repeat, preparing myself for my own teenage angst by trying to feel everything she felt.)

In my memory, the 90s are tacked to my brain like a glow in the dark star that’s losing its charge; everything is grainy, and it has always just rained; there is a dirty carpet in a dying roller rink and it looks like a photo of the universe—soiled with crushed popcorn and crumpled napkins bearing rejected phone numbers that come together to resemble clusters of cosmos burning from far far away—what was and will never be again. In my version of the 90s, I am always alone in a park with my fingers laced through a wet chain link fence; I am wearing a short fitted velour pink dress, just like the one Elisabeth Harnois wore in My Date with the President’s Daughter; I am taking my glasses off and waiting for someone to realize that I was beautiful all along…

Gen Z says millennials have an unhealthy attachment to the 90s sitcom Friends, and I’m wondering if the grain of truth to this observation is because a number of millennials honestly expected adulthood to resemble the show; to have a clear beginning, middle and end; to be a joke that never flopped due to the promise of canned laughter—love and kinship at the heart of every story. Like, I don’t even like Friends and, still, I have never forgotten the theme song or how I felt when Courteney Cox turned the light out at the end: warm and absolute as the past, like the red doors leading into my parents’ house.

Michelle Orange, an essayist, wrote about the “theory of receptivity” and defined it as: “the idea, often cited by young people in their case against the relevance of even marginally older people, that one’s taste—in music or film, literature or fine cuisine—petrifies during life’s peak of happiness or nadir of misery.” She wrote: “But tell me, have you seen 1999?” and, then, she went on to explain why 1999 was her personal peak and nadir. (She was right to herald and lament the final year of the 20th century, considering the 2000s were the identity crisis of all decades. Left unhinged by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Great Recession, the 2000s can be summarized with a single image: Britney Spears shaving her own head.)

While the 90s got to be the romantic landscape on which I built my hopes and dreams, the 2010s—the decade that consumed a majority of my 20s—were a different story. (For me, the 2010s are drawn on soggy construction paper—there are pretty colors and interesting stains, but ultimately: they don’t resolve.)

In the mid 2010s I spent most of my nights making a home out of my tiny vegan leather jacket, curled up on ottomans at house parties and sleeping like a housecat. 

Most mornings I drove around aimlessly: every untraveled road seemed to spit me back out someplace that I used to know, and I constantly found myself sympathizing with all the rusted-out buildings that were so soaked through with fentanyl I could’ve vomited.

Sometimes my friends and I would go to this boomer millionaire’s mansion. (We cured our hangovers with bloody marys on a massive deck in the middle of March, when the air felt less cruel. We stuck colored straws together like Crayola markers and sucked Fireball straight from the bottle as if it were a giant Capri Sun.)

One time the millionaire gave us his credit card and told us to rack it up at all the bars. (We signed all the receipts with the shapes of criss-cross stars and I felt like a little kid again: at last! But then I woke up with a monumental migraine. I was staring at a copy of Disney’s Pocahontas on VHS when I realized that the illusion of sustained hedonism had been shattered. I remember it clearly: the TV was broken, like it had been pitched across the living room; there was nothing but static, the screen cracked down the middle with a fuchsia lightning strike. Sam Smith’s I’m Not The Only One was wailing on repeat from the kitchen in a way that was practically Satanic. I asked myself: Is it time to go home?)

Everything in the 2010s felt so out of context, especially me. (I dreamed my way through that mansion of chaos and broken glass. I gazed upon ponds of gin and heard what I thought was freedom, ringing from sea to shining sea… High on edibles, I asked: “Do you hear that?” And I thought to myself: It’s my own name being called back to me.)

Somedays I honestly wondered: Why is being selfish so wrong? Isn’t selfish the most honest thing a person can be? Is cherry picking your beliefs really so bad? Isn’t the power to take it or leave it the only true power we have? And then, in the same breath, I’d romanticize self-annihilation. I’d write something in my journal, like: “Have you ever observed upset dust, illuminated by sunlight, and longed for that kind of release; to be as selfless as obliteration? Can I still be a feminist and say: that’s how it feels to put a dick in my mouth? Like—lights out, game over. Finally: I can lose myself.”

Obviously the 2010s, for me, were vapid and empty. Still, they were fun. (Is it worth mentioning that the word “nihilism” comes up in Boy Meets World more often than I expected?) They were the years that contained my—as Michelle Orange would say—peak of happiness and nadir of misery. 

My personal 1999 was 2016. (It was the year I fell in love with a guy who was diagnosably sociopathic—I know, how predictable—and my life went off the rails; it was the year I was assaulted and diagnosed with PTSD. It was the year I surrendered to all of my worst impulses. There came a time when a guy texted me, “Goodbye, Catherine,” and I got so pissed I could have hurled my iPhone into outer space. All of my abandonment issues were rising to the surface, coming to fruition. Oh, and not to mention: Donald Trump. I hated men so much, I could’ve sunk my pointed acrylic nails into any given man’s jugular and watched as his life drained out. I would’ve given anything to ask: “Now do you understand?”)

I was so angry then.

I did so much cocaine I almost died—or at least, it felt like I did. 

I wound up in the hospital and they shot me up with lorazepam. As I wept, the nurse asked, “Isn’t there anybody you can call?” And I couldn’t think of anyone. (That night, I fell asleep to the lullaby of dancing paper letters—ones I cut out for myself. Woozy from all the benzos, I read Lena Dunham’s words, over and over again: “Nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke”—the perfect inverse of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” Nobody noticed that anything was wrong, at least not until my mother found the discharge papers, stating a diagnosis of “polysubstance abuse”, on my desk, one week later.)

2016 was the year I experienced the first true break in the bond with my mother, like the sound of a twig snapping from underneath the foot of some mysterious beast out in the woods. Except it felt more crushing than that, like losing a religion I would’ve died for. (There is a proverb that says: “God could not be everywhere, therefore he made mothers.”)

One day my mother read the story of The Little Red Hen aloud. Her voice cracked in the middle of the story; she teared up at the image of the little red hen working so hard while all the other animals slept. “I’m the little red hen,” my mother said. And I hated myself for being just one more lazy animal in her roost. (I wanted to tell her everything: how I raked the end of an unbent paper clip across my skin until it created a wound that would scar—when I was only twelve years old—because I didn’t want to tell her a man had forced me to kiss him, on the mouth, in a garage. How often I tried to starve myself; how obsessed I was with being perfect. How, ever since childhood, I’d carried her pain around inside me like a jammed locket stuck in my throat. How, if I could have one wish, it would be to cough it up and pry it open and show her her own love.)

In 2016, I wondered all the time, if anything for me would ever be good enough; I mistook every form of nourishment as being gluttonous.

I’ve read that these are all symptoms of what some psychologists call “mother hunger”: a wound that isn’t always personal in nature, but is inextricably linked to childhood. It’s a term often used to describe the chronic emptiness that many of us feel; a sort of listless and constant wondering of “what’s the point?” in all matters of pursuit and desire; an inherent sense of worthlessness that makes it difficult to break cyclical and self-destructive behavior. More or less, it’s the desire to piece together a shattered identity and rebuild whatever trauma has undone. (In Boy Meets World, Shawn Hunter—whose surname, I’m realizing, is a bit on the nose—almost joins a cult. He explains his reasoning to his teacher, Mr. Turner, by describing his own “mother hunger.” He says: “All my life, I have felt like there was some part of me missing, and I felt like everybody could tell… like there was some hole in me, and everyone could see through it, like I wasn’t finished or something.”)

When I was a child, I befriended a girl whose mother kept a house with many rooms and decorated the walls with painted molds of her daughters’ handprints. They had everything: spinning night lights that projected moving images of unicorns, TVs in every room, every Disney movie on DVD, a Pepsi fridge filled with exclusive flavors, a zipline and white fudge covered Oreos… One night they had me over for dinner, and my new friend’s mother made Pillsbury biscuits with garlic mashed potatoes and chicken; the whole family ate dinner together like a nuclear wet dream, and the mother kept calling me by name, saying, “Catherine, you’re so sensible,” and I envied my friend’s life filled with so many beautiful things.

In retrospect, I liken my friend’s mother to the “other mother” in Henry Selick’s stop motion adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. (The movie where a little girl named Coraline—who is emotionally neglected by her busy parents—crawls through a mysterious door and finds herself in a parallel universe where everything is a glittering copy of her former reality, all thanks to an idyllic “other mother” who, naturally, turns out to be evil.) And, just like in the movie, my other mother’s illusion of a perfect home wouldn’t hold: that friend’s parents are divorced now, and they don’t live in that house anymore. It’s been nineteen years, and the same swings still hang in the backyard, dusty and untouched, like artifacts from a fallen suburban empire.

All that being said, my other mother was the one person who, when she heard I was cutting, said: “Do you think Catherine wants more attention from her parents?” And at the time I got angry when this question was relayed back to me—because my parents were perfect, obviously—but now I wonder: maybe there was some truth to it. (In Coraline, after the other mother’s veneer of perfection has cracked, after she grows gaunt and cruel and spindly, Coraline tries to escape the “other world” but, instead, keeps finding herself right back where she started—with her other mother. “How can you walk away from something and still come back to it?” she asks.)

Good or bad, all childhoods eventually need to be grieved. Otherwise you’re going to spend your entire life aloof and adrift, always ending up right back where you started.

Still, I cling to a memory: when I was seventeen and so depressed that I couldn’t eat—stuck in the limbo of the summer between my junior and senior years of high school with no serious future prospects—my mother drove me around in circles as if I were a colicky baby. She bought me bags of Flipz chocolate covered pretzels because they were the only food I could tolerate. And, with the recollection of this memory, I am always struck—even now, as I write this—by the jarring realization that: no one is coming. Like the ultimate crushing of all my 90s inspired adolescent fantasies: there is no “Wonderwall” by the Oasis definition. No one is going to be the one that saves me. (Of course now I can drive myself around in circles, and I can buy my own chocolate pretzels, but the point is: I’m not the same as my mother, and I’ll never be the same as my mother, and that’s a stomach ache that’s never really going to go away.)

Gen Z says that millennials are suffering from a collective identity crisis, and in response to this judgment, one millennial said: “The world we trained for no longer existed when we were ready to enter it. Gen Z didn’t have that jarring realization. They’re already imagining a new world.”

Is it out of line to suggest that both of these sentiments are correct? 

A TikTok astrologist explained it to me once: according to the stars, millennials are a generation defined by childhood trauma. (Arguably, all generations are defined by trauma—but try to play along with me for a second.)

A common side effect of trauma is dissociation: a dream-like, out-of-body, survival mechanism used to protect oneself from emotional and physical pain. (On September 11, 2001: I bounced a clear rubber ball up and down my driveway and gazed into it like a crystal ball; staring at the star-shaped confetti trapped inside it, like mosquitos in amber, I realized that if I wanted life to be even remotely tolerable then I’d have to paint over it with cotton candy hues, would have to cover up its holes with leopard print tape.)

Therefore, is it wrong to assume that we all put on our millennial-pink tinted glasses and then refused to take them off; that we grew up believing we could get away with never growing up?

In my whiniest “snowflake” voice: It just isn’t fair! As millennials, we grew up straddling the line between two ever-dividing worlds: we can remember landlines and iPhones, text messages and pen pals, dial-up and wifi, google and encyclopedias, static and HD, on demand and waiting a week, all of capitalism’s empty promises and the shrinking middle class… we were the guinea pigs for a modern world of whiplash! (A psychologist—Tamar Chansky—defines homesickness as: “a transition between two worlds.” And, by this definition, millennials have lived their entire lives in a state of homesickness—so no wonder we’re having a collective identity crisis and attributing our character flaws to the results of a Buzzfeed personality quiz. We just want something to remain constant, for something to be the way that it should’ve been.)

Still, like I said: good or bad, all childhoods need to be grieved. (When I was a child, I went to Sunday school and learned about The Parable of The Lost Son. In the story, a wealthy man’s son runs away from home and spends all of his inheritance on debauchery and prostitutes. The son seems to enjoy this life—at least for a while—but then famine falls upon his new country, and—after he finds himself salivating at the sight of pig slop—he realizes how badly he wants to go home. After all the fun of hedonism has been exhausted, the son learns to value home for its unconditional love: his father embraces him upon his return. Although I’m not religious anymore, this story has never stopped meaning something very profound to me: as an adult, I have searched far and wide for satisfaction in its embrace.)

In a nightmare, I was reunited with the sociopath I had loved during my peak of happiness and nadir of misery. 

He wrapped a piece of my hair around his finger and pulled. He said, “You’re so pretty, I could hit you.” And I remembered why I’d liked him so much: I got to have everything both ways. (This is me cherry picking my beliefs again, just like I did back in the 2010s: Jesus loved the grace of the whore who washed his feet with her tears and wiped them clean with her own hair, he judged all who judged her. Why shouldn’t I embrace all of my worst impulses in this way?)

Next thing I knew, I was back at the sociopath’s house, in the kitchen, biting into a hummingbird that turned into a Klondike Bar that I couldn’t stop eating. (This is how much “real life” makes sense: it really never is your worst qualities that get used against you, it’s always your best ones.) I turned to him and said, “Baby, roll the windows down and let the air sharpen your skin.” But he wouldn’t do it, he pretended like he couldn’t hear me. (The more I realize the things that I don’t want, the more I understand the things that I do: I want to pity the one who has never felt his own skin prick at the height of emotion in a Taylor Swift song; I want to gaze upon my own emptiness as if it were a window into a better world; I want to write essays that read like music and repay every karmic debt by holding the man that I love like a paper football in my back pocket; I want to be too-too sweet.)

Soon, we were alone in the dark. Closer by the Chainsmokers was blaring at the highest volume, and I could sort of make out his face in front of mine, like a jack-o-lantern’s; he had snuff stuck between his teeth like black licorice, and despite all my past longing to taste the bitterness of that candy: I just wanted to go home. (There was a time when the back of my head pitched through his garage window would’ve been preferable to all this logic, but the reality of everything I’ve ever romanticized is this: no graduation ceremony was ever as sad as it should’ve been.)

Suddenly, my mother appeared. 

“Get up,” she said, “you’re covered in glass.”

I woke up alone in my parents’ bed, swaddled up in the sheets like a newborn baby.

I found a picture of the Boy Meets World cast at a reunion in 2019, and I smiled because they all looked different.