It was very important you to be uNiQuE and DiFfErEnT in a way that makes you cringe so hard when you look back at your middle school self. You were probably trying to be a “manic pixie dream girl,” but it’s really not your fault. Blame it on our culture. You probably spent a lot of time trying on dresses at Deb and making your friends watch as you modeled them back and forth across the store. And of course, you tried each dress on with those clear plastic heels that Deb was always consistently stocked with. You owned SEVERAL pairs of denim capri pants and always paired them with those Limited Too monkey T-shirts that said things like, “It wasn’t me” or “Up to no good.” You had for sure never even been in the same mall as one of these stores, and your favorite clothes probably came from Express if you were lucky. You might have even tried to convince your friends your Claire’s jewelry was from Tiffany’s, but no one really believed you. You had LimeWire open 24/7 and never went anywhere without a Sharpie, just in case you had to add a song lyric or a broken “<3” to your already-very-doodled-on Converse. This could go one of two ways: You were either a closeted lesbian who had a crush on Mia Hamm, or a closeted gay trying to throw people off your scent (and had a crush on David Beckham). You IM’ed SmarterChild a lot and drew abstract art in Microsoft Paint. Your bedroom wall was covered — like, every square inch — in magazine cutouts of celebrities, and your dad couldn’t even come into your room anymore because it made him so mad. You used baby pink-colored Comic Sans as your font even though all your friends told you they could barely see it. But you didn’t care; it was all about the ~aesthetic~ for you. You always left cryptic away messages, but really you were just watching the Unsolved Mysteries marathon on Lifetime every day after school before your parents got home. If given the chance, you would corner literally anyone to tell them why Tarantino is the most important filmmaker of our time, and scoffed at people who liked anything that you thought was too “mainstream.” You wore a lot of roll-on body glitter and had a huge collection of gel pens that you’d bring to school every day to write notes to people during class. You orchestrated and participated in A LOT of three-way phone call attacks. You were no nonsense and could not be peer pressured. It might have made a lot of people kind of uneasy. But you now have the strongest passwords known to man. Ain’t nobody stealing your identity. You definitely sought out paranormal experiences and were convinced you could see ghosts and shit. You probably related a little too much to the witchcraft episode of PEN15 (“shalaylay pumpano!!”). You spent the entirety of math class typing things like “8OO85” on your calculator and showing it to your friends. And you definitely hate your job now. You for sure had undiagnosed social anxiety, and the idea of making a screen name was actually so stressful that you crumbled under the pressure and just did this.
