Facebook Shows Me Cringey Posts I Made 15 Years Ago — It Taught Me a Lot About Myself

Recently, Facebook has been showing me Facebook posts I made from 2009 to 2011 in a collection of “your memories on Facebook.” I just turned 27 years old, but at that time, I was 12 to 14. I don’t know anyone who is ultimately super proud of who they were at 12 to 14, and I certainly fit into that category of people who have grown and changed for the better.

Let me preface by saying I’m not going to screenshot any posts Facebook is showing me I made from that time. They are too embarrassing, too cringey, and a version of myself I’d rather not expose to the public anymore. I have a rule, contrary to much general advice given to my generation, not to delete any old social media posts or articles I write. I try to embrace my whole self and past rather than sanitize it or try to pretend I was never struggling or held an opinion I’m ashamed of. It certainly helps that I rarely posted about politics during this time, too.

However, I did see a post from 13 years ago where I posted “I really wish I was white.” As an Asian person who is now very entwined with a very diverse community, and who has been steeped in 13 years of diversity and antiracism training and exposure I didn’t have in 2011, I panicked and immediately took the post down, even though it went against my principle of not sanitizing my social media feed.

Of course, I knew where 13-year-old me was coming from — I just moved to a predominantly White area and school district. Compared to my previous schools and places I lived, I stuck out a lot more and was a bit more of an outcast as a result. I wanted to fit in. No one necessarily said anything that made me feel like I wasn’t accepted, but I was in a stage where I had a lot of social anxiety and was hyperconscious of any way I would not fit in.

There was also the infamous phase where everyone posted “truth is” on Facebook. If you posted this as your Facebook status, if someone liked your Facebook status, you had to make a post on their wall to tell them what you really thought of them. I recall I got one post that said “truth is who r u?”, a Facebook friend that I didn’t really know that well in real life, and who, after a few years, forgot who I was altogether (there are likely plenty of these now). There was a “truth is” from a friend who just wanted to hang out more often, since I just moved to a new area.

There were also, in hindsight, incredibly petty grievances I shared on Facebook about classmates I felt like had wronged me. There was a phase where I posted a lot of, what I thought, were super inspirational and philosophical quotes. I look back on these quotes and find them cliche and unoriginal.

Philosophically, I don’t think anyone should be super proud of who they were 12–14 years ago. We are always growing and improving and we should always endeavor to be better people. I think posts we regret and find incredibly cringey are a sign of that growth.

But that doesn’t make any of those posts, statuses, and photos easier to see, or the instinctive reaction any less visceral. Although I am well aware my reaction to these posts is a sign of growth, seeing who I was at 12 years old is a painful reminder that I, too, was a moody teenager who didn’t know how to handle his emotions, much like some of the students I have taught over the years, as a high school special educator. It is a reminder for me to be more empathetic to my students, not only because I was once their age, but I felt a lot of the same emotions.

Not judging myself, however, has been a much more difficult challenge.

For me, it goes a lot deeper than cringing when I see old posts. Seeing what I posted on Facebook is a flashback to how that moment felt when I was in it — the memory brings back the painful emotions and experiences of the time.

At that time, particularly between 13 to 14, I no longer was a simple teenager who just wanted to be cool and be in the popular crowd. Something changed, and my insecurities escalated significantly.

I am unsure about whether it was a GI issue at the time, but I started to have weird stomach noises in quiet classrooms. It would happen when I was hungry. It would happen when I was not hungry.

No matter what I did, there would be frequent, loud noises coming from my stomach, which happened when I took tests or when we just had independent reading time. I panicked over whether anyone heard the noises. No one ever said anything to me about the noises, but it still happens once in a while today and people will ask if I’m hungry or something like that. Even if people did hear them, I overthought whether people cared or didn’t care at the time. I think teenagers can be very blunt, so more often than not, my classmates probably did not care when these noises happened because they did not say anything. However, in hindsight, even if they did, who cares?

Something else happened as an extension of those noises — I also started to become hyperconscious about breathing in quiet places. We learn to breathe as soon as we are born, so it sounds stupid to be insecure about something so second nature.

But I started to think a lot about how loud I was breathing in quiet spaces. When we were taking tests, it was all I could think about, sometimes, and I thought it made me the elephant in the room because I couldn’t breathe quietly. Naturally, the more I thought about it, the worse it got, the more elevated my mental state became, and I started breathing even louder, which was a catch-22 I could not shake. I knew this because a couple of classmates who sat next to me started breathing very heavily and audibly, so it seemed to bother them, too.

The combination of these two things, daily, felt like complete torture.

I tried everything at the time not to think about the breathing or the stomach noises. I tried to focus on school more. I looked online to see if anyone felt the same way, and besides the occasional obscure forum, no one did. It was around 2010, so the societal embrace of therapy and mental health that exploded at the tail of the decade had not yet come.

I found this thing called cognitive behavioral therapy that I thought might cure me. I brought it up to my parents, but these were completely foreign ideas to them — therapy, and the fact that I cared so much about things 99.9% of other people didn’t think about. The fact that the two of them didn’t get along and always fought also contributed to me not being able to seek them out for the help they needed, but their traditional Asian culture also did not have the language or space for therapy.

This was very intense social anxiety, and it made me a much better person. It made me far less abrasive and judgmental and more empathetic because it made me realize I didn’t know what was going on in someone else’s mind or at home. I felt intense gratitude to anyone who extended a hand of friendship or kindness at that particular time, as well, because these particular crises, however trivial they may sound, made me feel unlovable and unworthy. I found myself more isolated than ever because of this feeling of unworthiness, and it wasn’t like anyone could read my mind and know how much I panicked about these things and how much despair they caused me. I had to, at the time, suffer alone and in silence.

.Just because I would hyperventilate in class or my stomach would make weird noises, I thought there was something wrong with me. It made me feel bad about all those times I made other people feel small or insignificant when I wanted to be cool, fit in, and be seen as above someone else in a hierarchy.

Eventually, I found friends through running track and cross country. I was in classes with these friends. They never brought up the stomach noises or the heavy breathing, and it’s not like that fixation on these things ever went away, but the fixation just became much more distant. It just became a lot smaller compared to other things that were more important. I learned later on that everyone is going through something, and even if it is something as trivial and in your head as mine was. I learned that so many people were kind and polite to me in my time of need, so I endeavored to do the same for others to return the kindness.

I slip up, at times, now, but I always endeavor to approach all my interpersonal interactions with as much of that same kindness and politeness as possible. In most spaces, I’m known for being the one who is willing to lend a helping hand and go above and beyond to be kind. When I’m not known for that, which is likely in more spaces now than before as I operate more cutthroat spaces, I feel like a failure, and most of that feeling ties back to the sense of obligation I felt at that point in my life.

I look back at my Facebook posts of inspirational, philosophical, and cringe-worthy posts and see a teenager going through puberty who was struggling, trying to seek meaning, but asking the world for help. I saw a kid who didn’t have the vocabulary to ask for the kind of help he needed and a kid who felt trapped, and like he couldn’t be understood.

When I have time to think about it, I bring myself back to not only the content of what the decade-old Facebook posts say, but also the context of what was happening when I made those posts. I wouldn’t tell him “hey, don’t post all those cringey inspirational quotes.” I go to therapy now and find it incredibly meaningful and helpful, so I would tell him “hey, this is probably something you may want to talk to a therapist about.”

2010 mental health stigma is a far cry from 2024, open-the-floodgates kind of acceptance. I would tell him that many years later, he would learn John had been struggling with severe depression this whole time, and he would learn about it several years later. I would tell him that Ron, Jack, and Pat would all have his back when he needed to confide in people about even bigger personal problems and struggles. This sounds overly preachy, but I would try, as much as possible, to show him that there’s a whole world that is much bigger and wider than what he felt at the time.

I would tell the kid making those cringey, angsty teenager Facebook posts that he can’t just snap out of it, and there’s nothing wrong with him for not being able to. That’s not how mental health works.

But I would tell him he didn’t have to suffer alone and in silence for those several years, and it could be a lot easier if he confided in friends and/or a therapist. It didn’t make him a freak or an outlier, but a normal human being who struggled and wanted to get better, just like most people.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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