I was one of those people who was having an okay time in lockdown. I was hitting my freelance deadlines, getting up in the morning to work on a book proposal and I’d even bought a mini-trampoline to exercise in the living room—and was using it. I found clues to my calm state in recent articles that compare our emotions under lockdown to those experienced during grief, even suggesting that feeling the loss of control over our lives simulates grief.
That made sense to me. Having lost both my parents before my 20th birthday, I was used to feeling emotionally out of step with others. Double bereavement taught me to pinpoint the things I can't change and accept them. I've navigated the sudden sharp turns of emotion before. I've had the vivid dreams—but mine were grief dreams. Lockdown couldn’t compare to the worst time of my life, and I assumed that I would get through it using the lessons grief had taught me.
But, last week, a hashtag broke me. #MeAt20 started trending across Twitter and Instagram. The premise was simple: share a photo of yourself aged 20. Add a caption if you like. I was fascinated by the pictures that people chose to share. For those who weren’t extremely online at the age of 20, photos were dug out of Facebooks, Flickrs and even real-life albums. Famous people rushed to post joyous images of their younger selves.
Nigella Lawson’s post bent the rules slightly because, as she wrote, “Can’t find one at 20, so here’s one when I was 23.” Her black-and-white portrait was so striking that a crowd of famous commenters felt compelled to leave compliments. Carol Vorderman shared her graduation photo, adding: “Graduating age 20. 1981. Engineering. Cambridge Uni. VERY bad perm,” which might be the very definition of a humblebrag. Singer Alison Moyet’s post was a simple “#MeAt20 #Yazoo,” with a picture guaranteed to transport tweeters of a certain age right back to 1982 and her first hit, “Only You.”
Explaining why people were so keen to jump on this trend, psychologist Dr Rachel M Allan told The Telegraph: “We have a tendency to look back to a time when we perceive ourselves being innocent, life feeling different, more free. We contrast that with how the world feels now. Nostalgia can be a comfort.” But even as I was invited to join in with the celebratory hashtag, I knew that I couldn’t. Before I even looked, online or off, I knew that there wouldn’t be any pictures of me aged 20, when I had just become orphaned. The whole year is like a tear-sodden blur, and the shock of raw grief has bleached out all the detail from my memories.
While there are photos of me aged 18, 19, 21, 22 and onwards, sharing them would feel like a lie—erasing my parents’ illnesses and deaths to fit in with everyone else’s happy reminisces. I’d tried that when I was in my twenties, and it hadn’t worked then. No, I’d have to sit this one out, and deal with being reminded of how I’d had to sit out a lot of twenty-something experiences, because the work of grieving was so much more urgent.
But even while I was losing myself in those sad memories, I was drawn back to scrolling through the #MeAt20 hashtag. As unusual and intense as my twenties were, I’m not the only person who can’t call them the best decade of my life. The more I looked through the posts, the more I noticed that the captions and the images were often at odds. I saw that women in particular would often compare their weight or their state of mind at age 20 unfavourably with the present day. Many mentioned feeling fat at the younger age, when the picture shows otherwise, or feeling sad while the snap shows them looking happy.
Actress Emily Atack wrote: “#MeAt20 with my melon head and tiny little body, that was criticised for being too fat even then. You will never please everybody. So have that Easter egg for breakfast and relax.” Comedian Julia Sutherland tweeted: “#MeAt20 is depressing on so many levels! Due to self loathing at the time, this is ONLY pic I could find of myself *taken* aged 20.” Lifestyle journalist Jenny Stallard posted: “The main thing I think when I go through pics to find one of me at 20 is 'God I always thought I was fat and I never really was and it REALLY never mattered because look how much fun I was having' and I wish I could channel that now. Trying.. #MeAt20,” before tweeting again to share a picture of herself.
I found so many #MeAt20 snaps posted with a reflection on how sad the poster was back then. There are brave faces plastered over grief, toxic relationships that were only escaped much later and, occasionally, a current 20-year-old who knows that she is meant to be living out the best years of her life, but can’t feel it: “#MeAt20 (now)—sad, stressed, constantly on the verge of tears…” These posts are reminders that so much of being in our twenties is about carefully curating the outward persona, while inwardly struggling to figure out who we are going to be. In a digital age, that persona exists across an average of 8 different social platforms, stretching the line between curation and performance ever thinner.
“80% of life's most defining moments take place by about age 35. Two-thirds of lifetime wage growth happens during the first ten years of a career… Personality can change more during our 20s than at any other decade in life,” writes clinical psychologist Dr Meg Jay, author of The Defining Decade: Why Your 20s Matter. Her first two points are terrifying, but also very open to interpretation in an era when social values and the economy are changing rapidly.
Dr Jay’s third claim is perhaps the one that holds the key to the paradox of being a twentysomething: our brains haven’t yet matured, so we can’t yet be the people we want to be. We have to put in the time, just like everyone else. At 20, we’re trying to peer into the future, to see how it will all work out. It takes maturity to understand that we won’t ever truly know, and that has to be enough.
That made sense to me. Having lost both my parents before my 20th birthday, I was used to feeling emotionally out of step with others. Double bereavement taught me to pinpoint the things I can't change and accept them. I've navigated the sudden sharp turns of emotion before. I've had the vivid dreams—but mine were grief dreams. Lockdown couldn’t compare to the worst time of my life, and I assumed that I would get through it using the lessons grief had taught me.
But, last week, a hashtag broke me. #MeAt20 started trending across Twitter and Instagram. The premise was simple: share a photo of yourself aged 20. Add a caption if you like. I was fascinated by the pictures that people chose to share. For those who weren’t extremely online at the age of 20, photos were dug out of Facebooks, Flickrs and even real-life albums. Famous people rushed to post joyous images of their younger selves.
Nigella Lawson’s post bent the rules slightly because, as she wrote, “Can’t find one at 20, so here’s one when I was 23.” Her black-and-white portrait was so striking that a crowd of famous commenters felt compelled to leave compliments. Carol Vorderman shared her graduation photo, adding: “Graduating age 20. 1981. Engineering. Cambridge Uni. VERY bad perm,” which might be the very definition of a humblebrag. Singer Alison Moyet’s post was a simple “#MeAt20 #Yazoo,” with a picture guaranteed to transport tweeters of a certain age right back to 1982 and her first hit, “Only You.”
Explaining why people were so keen to jump on this trend, psychologist Dr Rachel M Allan told The Telegraph: “We have a tendency to look back to a time when we perceive ourselves being innocent, life feeling different, more free. We contrast that with how the world feels now. Nostalgia can be a comfort.” But even as I was invited to join in with the celebratory hashtag, I knew that I couldn’t. Before I even looked, online or off, I knew that there wouldn’t be any pictures of me aged 20, when I had just become orphaned. The whole year is like a tear-sodden blur, and the shock of raw grief has bleached out all the detail from my memories.
While there are photos of me aged 18, 19, 21, 22 and onwards, sharing them would feel like a lie—erasing my parents’ illnesses and deaths to fit in with everyone else’s happy reminisces. I’d tried that when I was in my twenties, and it hadn’t worked then. No, I’d have to sit this one out, and deal with being reminded of how I’d had to sit out a lot of twenty-something experiences, because the work of grieving was so much more urgent.
But even while I was losing myself in those sad memories, I was drawn back to scrolling through the #MeAt20 hashtag. As unusual and intense as my twenties were, I’m not the only person who can’t call them the best decade of my life. The more I looked through the posts, the more I noticed that the captions and the images were often at odds. I saw that women in particular would often compare their weight or their state of mind at age 20 unfavourably with the present day. Many mentioned feeling fat at the younger age, when the picture shows otherwise, or feeling sad while the snap shows them looking happy.
Actress Emily Atack wrote: “#MeAt20 with my melon head and tiny little body, that was criticised for being too fat even then. You will never please everybody. So have that Easter egg for breakfast and relax.” Comedian Julia Sutherland tweeted: “#MeAt20 is depressing on so many levels! Due to self loathing at the time, this is ONLY pic I could find of myself *taken* aged 20.” Lifestyle journalist Jenny Stallard posted: “The main thing I think when I go through pics to find one of me at 20 is 'God I always thought I was fat and I never really was and it REALLY never mattered because look how much fun I was having' and I wish I could channel that now. Trying.. #MeAt20,” before tweeting again to share a picture of herself.
I found so many #MeAt20 snaps posted with a reflection on how sad the poster was back then. There are brave faces plastered over grief, toxic relationships that were only escaped much later and, occasionally, a current 20-year-old who knows that she is meant to be living out the best years of her life, but can’t feel it: “#MeAt20 (now)—sad, stressed, constantly on the verge of tears…” These posts are reminders that so much of being in our twenties is about carefully curating the outward persona, while inwardly struggling to figure out who we are going to be. In a digital age, that persona exists across an average of 8 different social platforms, stretching the line between curation and performance ever thinner.
“80% of life's most defining moments take place by about age 35. Two-thirds of lifetime wage growth happens during the first ten years of a career… Personality can change more during our 20s than at any other decade in life,” writes clinical psychologist Dr Meg Jay, author of The Defining Decade: Why Your 20s Matter. Her first two points are terrifying, but also very open to interpretation in an era when social values and the economy are changing rapidly.
Dr Jay’s third claim is perhaps the one that holds the key to the paradox of being a twentysomething: our brains haven’t yet matured, so we can’t yet be the people we want to be. We have to put in the time, just like everyone else. At 20, we’re trying to peer into the future, to see how it will all work out. It takes maturity to understand that we won’t ever truly know, and that has to be enough.
