The pandemic has brought us a lot of things. For me, it meant uprooting my post-graduation plans and moving back home with my parents. This triggered a lot of memories and emotions I wasn’t prepared to deal with. I was ready to be an adult and take the next step of my life, but instead, I felt like I was taking two steps back and regressing to my high school self. Since being home, I’ve gone through old journals and yearbooks, rewatched the shows and movies I loved years ago, and saw how much my old high school has changed in the five years since I graduated. This past year has been overwhelmingly nostalgic. Sometimes good (like getting to introduce my little sister to iCarly) and sometimes bad (having to watch Dan Schneider’s creepy foot fetish manifest on iCarly). Overall, it is something that has made me feel connected to my past. It also makes me realize that I am finally old enough to feel nostalgic for a time that was simpler, before social media, before smartphones, and before my little brain could even comprehend the difficulties of adulthood. This month we are exploring nostalgia and what it means to us. Growing up is bittersweet, but we hope our stories of joy, pain, embarrassment, and reflection resonate and connect you with your younger self.
Blossom was born out of nostalgia. Maddy and I, both sequestered in our childhood bedrooms and regressing back into our high school interests, found ourselves reflecting on the magazines that shaped our youth. These publications, for better or for worse, served as a roadmap for navigating adolescence and provided a glossy, editorialized glimpse into what adulthood could be. I thought by now I would be 30, flirty, and thriving (okay 23, but you get the point). Things didn’t exactly turn out the way we imagined it. There were no magazine articles about how to deal with your roommates hating you, or what to do when your college degree turns out to be kind of useless, or how to cope when a fucking pandemic derails your whole life plan. We found ourselves wishing for a magazine that would help guide us through adulthood, the same way that Rookie and Teen Vogue guided us through adolescence. We couldn’t find one, so we decided to do it ourselves. Our goal was to create something that could help our friends navigate their 20s - which as it turns out, are just as weird and embarrassing and complicated as our teen years. Maybe even more so. Hopefully, in a few years, we’ll all be able to look back at this period of our lives and feel just as nostalgic and affectionately mortified as we do when thinking about our teenage selves.
