The Self the 2016 Trend Helped Me See

“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion famously wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It could be argued, however, that the current internet trend of posting pictures from 2016 is taking Didion’s advice just a smidge too far.

That’s how I felt at first, anyway, watching my timeline fill up with people’s decade-old selfies and party shots from the year that Prince died, Hamilton fever hit, and the biggest controversy in pop culture was an all-female Ghostbusters reboot. I was overcome by cringe nostalgia just like any good millennial (did we really need quite so much Boy Brow?), but I felt a deep aversion to posting any photos of my own. The reason hit me square in the face when I went back to look at them. Newly graduated from college, I was not-so-subtly starving myself that year, trying to make a go of it in Los Angeles while actually diverting the vast majority of my time and energy to eating as little as possible, and exercising off as much as possible of what I did.

I’ve been writing for years about my experience with disordered eating, but other than in a brief chapter of my book on the topic, I haven’t actually spent much time reminiscing about 2016. I’ve thought and written a lot about the compulsive binge eating that came later, but there was something distinctly painful about keeping myself consistently hungry before I had the therapy-derived language to express why I was doing it.

When I look back at photos from 2016, I see someone I barely recognize. Scrolling through shots of myself at the beach with my friends, at dance parties in Echo Park, at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple, all that stands out to me is the vacancy in my eyes that I don’t think I’m imagining. (That’s not true, actually: my collarbone stands out too, as does the sinew of my arms.) And though I’m so profoundly lucky to be who I am today—fat and mostly happy; in recovery from my eating disorder; surrounded by a wide, loving group of friends and family—what hurts the most, revisiting those pictures, is knowing that a not-small subset of the world valued me infinitely more when I valued myself infinitely less, all because I was thin then.

I wish I could find joy or even humor in my 2016 photos the way that so many of my friends seem to do, but what I am getting out of the 2016-throwback trend is a new empathy for the Emma of a decade ago. Even after I grew up a little, stopped starving and self-punishing, got correctly medicated, and quit letting the meanest possible voices in my head run my life, I still regarded myself at 22 and 23 with some measure of revulsion. The thought went a bit like: Girl, of course you’re not Lena Dunham yet. Nobody’s actually happy in their early 20s. Get on Abilify; start eating protein, carbs, and fat three meals a day; and put women on your Tinder. It will all be okay.

Now, though, I’m trying to spare a little gentleness for the version of myself who felt acutely that I was squandering everything I’d been given by not being thinner, more successful, more popular, just…more. Well, from now on, I choose to honor the part of myself that felt she had to shrink in order to expand her life in the ways she so desperately wanted—because, to Didion’s point, how can I move forward without giving her the courtesy of a nod? She deserves at least that much.