Looking Backwards (The Glow Up vs The Cringe)

By Bea Mendoza

This year I turned twenty. The two decades under my belt mark that I am, obviously, now so wise and so old. Sometimes, I and the other twenty-somethings that I know sit around and trade stories and photos of our past lives. For the laughs, of course. We laugh because, obviously, we were once so young and so dumb, and aren’t we so glad to not be them anymore?

“I’m so thankful for my glow-up,” we usually say. To which I internally say, “Did I glow up?” Are we really supposed to look at our past selves and imply them as dull? 

When I look back on my tween self, it is very clear that I was uncool. One might even say I was cringeworthy. But what’s the point in cringing? In order to become who I am, the version of myself who is maybe more collected and maybe less uncool, I had to go through… that. And that was red skinny jeans and neon T-shirts that made me glow in the darkness of the science lab. And really wanting knee-high Converse All Star high tops and feeling personally attacked when a friend I had in the sixth grade made an offhand comment about how those shoes were “bad taste.” And, also, wearing oh-so many pun-based graphic tees. Through all of these, I was happy in the way that only someone so oblivious of other people’s opinions could be. Or, maybe more accurately, I was happy in the way that only someone so stunningly self-assured could be. Somewhere along the groaning growing pains of late-teenagedom, I lost the spark that made me confident enough to loudly proclaim whatever thought came into my head, or to wear green polka-dotted skinny jeans, or to do exactly what I wanted without giving it a second thought. 

Which is why when I see my brace-faced, blunt-bang-wearing, bright-eyed pre-pubescent self, I can’t cringe at her. I can’t think ill of her. I can’t watch videos of my past self acting in (self-described) “random” ways and not find joy in them. There is so much unadulterated joy radiating off of her. We are expected to hate our child selves, and regret decisions that once made us so happy; to regret decisions that were once so important to us.

Of course everyone needs to change and become anew. No one’s perfect, and our tastes evolve so quickly we hardly notice it within ourselves. I definitely would not go for a pair of knee-high sneakers (I turned into an Oxford sort of gal), but the year I was obsessed with those was the year I started wearing turtlenecks, which are a staple part of my wardrobe today. 

Sometimes the glow up is real, and it’s important to celebrate our growth, but this can be done without disowning our past selves. When a plant finally blossoms, you rip it from the root. You praise the flower, and you let the growth continue. 

I’m only twenty, and I am neither wise nor old, not to the degree that I perhaps subconsciously believe I am. However, I do possess the “wise” self-awareness that there will always be the impulse to look upon our pasts with regret. Instead of leaning into those impulses and thinking all of our past decisions to be wrong, I implore instead a mindset of gratitude and grace; an approach of gratefulness for the experience of becoming. 

I’ll probably still cringe at a memory every now and then as I lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling and taking stock of my Worst Hits. But hey, there’s always next time, and though that might not be so great, either, I’ll have learned so much of what not to do. Isn’t that all we can hope for?