Erin’s Column: Full Cringe.

When I was in my 20s, I was a writer. 
Like a real writer, not just a writer of shopping lists and birthday cards. For eight years, I wrote a column for the local paper where I overshared about first dates and drunken kisses and being a fish out of water, a New York transplant learning how to do life in her 20s in the Midwest. 

If I thought it, I wrote it — like every idea I had needed to be grasped and tacked to a page before it floated away. 

When I look back at what I wrote… well, “it’s full cringe,” as the Gen Z people in my office would say. I can’t say that though, because now I’m a middle-aged mom, rapidly approaching 40. I part my hair weirdly, I can’t tell you what the cool jeans are, and I smile blankly when my coworkers talk about the music they listen to. 

I look back at the near-endless stream-of-consciousness writing I did in my 20s — and I am so confused as to why people wanted to read it, and even more baffled why the publishers let me keep writing. Who was I to think anyone would care what in the world I had to say? (Answer: I was someone younger, with what can now be described as May I Speak With the Manager hair.)

When I moved here as a cocky 22-year-old, I documented my observations about a town that was, in my estimation, charming but a little small in its scope and its view. I arrogantly thought the people of Kokomo were much less worldly and complicated than their East Coast counterparts. Over the years, as this town embraced me and all my flaws, I saw how wrong I was. Each week, I learned a little more about myself and the world, and I invited readers in to follow along on my misadventures. 

I regard the things I wrote with the same sort of embarrassed nostalgia I feel when I look at my high school yearbook. I can almost smell the CK-One when I flip through those pages, and I can feel the wonder of first loves and the melodramatic sting of 20something heartbreak in all those old columns. 

But here’s the amazing thing: I think the paper’s readers felt that too. I remember many of my readers were older than me by decades, and I never understood it until now. There is a beautiful, complicated thing that happens in revisiting an era that is behind you. 

These days, I am watching the Gen Z staffers in my office with a bittersweet pang of nostalgia and empathy, as I hear them talk about navigating the professional world, assessing their friendships, thinking about the future. I am watching them get engaged, grow babies in their bellies and renovate houses. I see myself in them in a way I never expected, and there’s a strange commingling of longing for that time and relief to be past it. I wonder if that’s how my readers felt. 

I haven’t written much that I have put out into the world in a long time, so when I write now, it’s just been for me. I write about the challenges of being a working mom who loves her children so much it hurts and also wants them to, for the love of all that is holy, leave her alone for 15 minutes when she gets home. I write about the complexity of wishing to stop time and hold each precious moment with these little people, but also guiltily missing the freedom that we had before them. I write about the strange stage in my late 30s, watching my friendships evolve and change, and seeing my parents grow older, nervous about what comes next for them and for me. 

A lot of the same questions are echoing in my head as I write this. Who am I to think anyone will care what I have to say? 

Well, I suppose we are about to find out, because I will be publishing something each week, right here. 

My name is Erin, I’m heading into my 40s — and maybe it will be “full cringe” — but I think I’m still a writer.