2016 For Me: Asses, Cancellations, Zara, Black Mold and More

A reflection on a year of my life before I reached unc status

I don’t know how exactly it started, but everywhere I look, people are reminiscing about 2016. To be honest, the whole thing is giving fake news. It’s giving astroturf. We were all there in 2016, right? I mean, except for teenagers, but are teenagers really that interested in what all the chopped uncs were doing ten years ago?

Anyway, assuming any of this is even real, or if anyone even cares, I will reflect on what 2016 was like for me

I should clarify that in 2016, I was twenty-six, and I wasn’t a Substack writer, or really a writer at all, in any professional capacity. I had no social media presence outside of a Facebook account where my photos were routinely liked by two people—my mom and any one of my mom’s friends (still not convinced she wasn’t paying a rotating friend every day to like my stuff.) I frequently posted on Reddit but not as “Cartoons Hate Her.” Instead, I posted lots of fake posts on Reddit. I don’t remember all of them, let alone that well, but this was before I got into r/AmITheAsshole. My most memorable troll was probably an overtly novelty account called YourLocalNeckbeard:

I even had a real fedora (my mistake, a trilby) “as a joke.”

Anyway, what else was I up to?

I was a married 26-year-old in San Francisco

By 2016, I had been married for two years. Keep in mind I was in San Francisco and working in tech (specifically the spammy mobile game advertisement startup world) so my being married at this age was very unusual. I don’t mean that in a “everyone JUDGED me for being YOUNG and HOT and MARRIED” the way every trad person online seems to think hideous hags at the park are judging them for having three adorable, perfectly-homeschooled children at twenty-nine just because they said they “had their hands full,” but my being married definitely put me in an odd spot culturally.

For one, everyone thought I was older than I was, and some of this probably had to do with being married. In San Francisco, it’s weird to be married before thirty, most PMC people marry even later than that. Saying “my husband” immediately aged me by an additional ten years, so along with the usual social ineptitude that made it hard to make friends, I felt like I had to keep clarifying my age to people. One time, I told my coworker I was twenty-six and he audibly gasped, but luckily for him I gave him the “out” of “Is it because I mentioned being married?” Arguably, that could have been another form of social ineptitude.

But the age thing definitely wasn’t 100% husband-related. A lot of people just thought I looked older, and it was a huge source of insecurity for me because nobody could really explain it. I didn’t have bad skin or an unhealthy lifestyle. If anything, I was a bit orthorexic in the dermatology department—already on tretinoin and reapplying 50 SPF throughout the workday due to my proximity to a (gasp) window. Looking at old photos of me from this era, I totally looked my age. But the most egregious case of this—still seared in my mind—was when a Sephora employee had “flattered” me by guessing my age as…thirty. He confessed he really thought I was thirty-five, but wanted to be nice.

So a lot of my headspace in 2016 wasn’t about the rising tide of fascism or whatever, it was about whether or not I was getting neck lines. Huge waste of time and energy, but if it wasn’t that, my OCD would have attached to North Korea or some obscure tropical virus.

I Was Ass-Obsessed

Sometimes I can’t even remember what on Earth I could possibly have been stressed about before I had kids. The answer: my ass being too small.