It’s pretty easy to remember your mistakes. Questions solved seconds after the deadline, embarrassing mistakes in the dreaded group project, Ill advised pickup lines and even worse dates. For those of us who haven’t mastered deeply repressing our memories from high school the problem is even worse. But what about those seemingly elusive good memories? While they may be sandwiched in between vivid memories of truly awful karaoke solos and the terrible sex that was absolutely your fault, maybe the last 18-80 years did have their moments after all?
We’d even go as far to say that if you’re not cringing when looking back. You haven’t lived enough (or are just really boring). If looking back on your younger days leaves you with disdain and a scrunchy face, it reflects a great period of growth; maybe you didn’t peak in highschool after all! It’s easy to beat down on cringier moments, but we all have to accept that maybe the cringe is what made us who we are today. Without that Young ACT phase, how would we now know that it’s equally not a good idea to rebound into Young TOP. And your future partners are sure to appreciate the lessons learned before their time (pro tip: remember to clean your toilet!)
So this week we’re embracing the cringe along with those treasured memories we often forget to remember. Log into your NeoPets account, download minecraft, get into a vicious argument online with an Ideahoan and take some time to do those things you don’t have time to anymore. In lockdown many of us ‘reverted’ to childhood comforts during what was a time of uncertainty; Mairātea got back into vocaloid, George went back and finished the games he probably shouldn’t have been playing in intermediate, and it looks like you got back with the ex you probably shouldn’t have started dating anyway. While we cant condone all of these, we’ll let you get away with them, this week only.
Remember the time you put way too much effort into a highschool school project, the night you spent losing ranked match after ranked match because you just had to end on a win, the smutty fanfiction lost on a long dead Wattpad account, Skype, and the first time you really pissed your parents off. But most of all, remember that you can actually still do all these things, writing smut is much like riding—a bike and disappointing your parents actually gets easier with age! If you thought they didn’t like who you were hanging out with in intermediate wait until they find out who you’re planning on moving in with. Much like a fine wine, the best mistakes are expensive and very difficult to clean.
While you’re thinking about the past, don’t forget to appreciate your everyday. One day those late night assignments and extremely healthy Munchy Mart lunches will be memories almost as distant as corporate cat and insanity wolf.
So while you work on your main character moment: go and bust out your old dusty playlists, take advantage of the on campus gamerzone, remember when craccum had forty pages, get removed from the campus gamerzone for screaming at your teammates, and then peruse some classic maymays to make yourself feel better (this week you can haz cheeseburger), lastly remember when doge wasn’t the mascot of everyone’s favourite ponzi scheme. We’ll go listen to nostalgic 2000s Nightcore remixes with no shame. We’re instantly transported to a simpler time, where our biggest worry was deciding who to give our daily allotted hearts to on Bebo.
‘RAwR’ (it means we love you),
Mairātea & George