By Ruby Voge, Opinion Co-Editor
• October 17, 2024
I don’t think of the uncertainty and powerlessness that can sometimes accompany childhood — the inverse of its innocence and lack of responsibility.
Nostalgia paints our memories into cinematic narratives. It colors them gold and pink like a late summer sunset. Nostalgia gives us something to fantasize about — to take us out of the monotony of the present and into the excitement of the past.
I realize that it’s not the sleepover you have with your two friends at the age of six that makes you a "big girl", but at the same time, I’m not sure it is your age that makes you older either. If anything, I feel like I have regressed to the whiny sixteen-year-old girl who I used to be. Is it possible to hate who you were at sixteen when you are nineteen, but become her at twenty?
I sat in class, trying to understand how I could make some sort of career for myself, but still be able to pick up my future children from school. As I attended a Catholic school during my elementary years, motherhood was synonymous with femininity and what it meant to be a woman. It wasn't until seventh grade that I realized this wasn’t necessarily true.
With college came my first opportunity for total self-actualization. But, as higher education gave me a supervised test run of adulthood, I realize now how much of my past excitement of growing up was blind to how much I’d miss my youth and the simplicity that came with it.
Working in a candy store, seeing Harriet the not-so-little kid coming in every day, gave me
greater hope for my looming adulthood. It’s not an impending doom the way people make it out to be, telling me to cherish my youth and not wish it all away. But I know better than they do that it’s entirely in my control.
I finally understood why the series had been such a big hit: it was an authentic and raw display of what it means to be human, all through the exploration of a complicated love story.
Trust is essential for healthy parent-child relationships. The depiction of a dysfunctional household in the Netflix original show "Dash and Lily" only serves to promote unhealthy communication between families.
