My 13-year-old daughter had been waiting for this movie since it was announced. She sent a group chat to me, her dad, her brothers, and her sister (for those who know my family she thinks of her oldest brother’s girlfriend as her sister, just as I consider her my daughter) saying we needed to get tickets this past weekend. Not asked. Announced. Tiny horror publicist with a phone and a mission.

She walked into Backrooms expecting one kind of movie, because she knows the Backrooms the way many kids her age know them: through games, YouTube, internet lore, liminal-space videos, and the shared online language of “no-clipping” out of reality.

I walked in more cautiously. I knew enough to realize I actually had no idea what to expect, but I do not like jump scares because they leave my body feeling tense for HOURS after.

I walked out feeling stunned. Yes, Backrooms is scary, and yes, I looked through my fingers quite a lot. It also does something genuinely impressive by turning an internet myth into a theatrical horror film. But what stayed with me most was the storytelling, and the theory I walked out carrying, one I cannot prove, but cannot shake:

Backrooms is a movie about an unraveling mind.

More specifically, this first film feels like a horror story about memory loss, dementia, mental illness, caregiving, trauma, and the terrifying impossibility of explaining what is happening inside a brain while it is happening to you.

I found no reliable public evidence that Kane Parsons has explicitly tied this movie to dementia. But Parsons has talked about Backrooms in relation to memory, psychology, liminal spaces, and the way humans attach meaning to places. In an interview with The Playlist, he described the film’s psychology as running parallel to the physical mechanics of human memory, and he spoke about memory as the way people connect pieces of their lives into context.

I’ve talked about mental illness quite a bit on this site. I’ve talked about C-PTSD, therapy, and the tiny rooms that make up my own mind. Which, now, after seeing this movie, is kind of freaking me out a bit.

Who Is Kane Parsons?

Kane Parsons, also known online as Kane Pixels, is the young filmmaker behind Backrooms. A24 lists Parsons as the director, Will Soodik as the writer, and Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve among the stars. The official A24 synopsis is almost rude in how little it gives away, but I respect the simplicity now that I know how complex the story really is. “A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.”

The Internet Myth Becomes a Movie

Parsons’ path to that strange doorway began years earlier. His viral YouTube work grew from the Backrooms concept, which traces to internet creepypasta and a 2019 4chan-born image/post about an endless fluorescent maze. The Associated Press describes the film as an adaptation of that internet meme turned urban legend, with Parsons bringing liminal-space horror to the big screen.

People Magazine reported that Parsons was still in high school when his Backrooms project became a feature-film opportunity, and that he chose the A24 deal instead of a more traditional college path. The outlet also reported that the film stars Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Mark Duplass, and is based on Parsons’ viral YouTube series inspired by the 4chan meme.

The remarkable thing about Backrooms is not that a 20-year-old made something surprisingly competent. That compliment feels too small, like handing someone a participation trophy after they built a haunted cathedral out of beige carpet and existential dread.

The remarkable thing is that a young creator seems to understand something older people often struggle to articulate: the horror of being trapped inside a system that keeps changing while you are still trying to understand the first rule.

A hallway. A memory. A symptom. A pattern. A room that looks almost like one you know.

The Movie My Child Expected, and the Movie I Saw

For younger viewers, Backrooms comes preloaded with expectations. It is internet horror. It is game-adjacent. It is a meme, a maze, a survival concept, a digital campfire story. For those who wanted that, they might be disappointed in what they actually got. Or maybe they didn’t deep dive into a metaphorical reflective pool afterward like I did.

The film does not simply give audiences monsters in hallways. It gives us Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Mary, played by Renate Reinsve. Clark is a furniture-store owner or manager who disappears into the Backrooms, while Mary is the therapist who tries to reach him.

That relationship changes the whole concept of the movie from a game to reality.

Clark Is Not Just Lost in a Place

Clark is not merely lost in the Backrooms. He is lost in himself.

And I want to be careful here, because Clark does seem to want help. He tapes off the door for Mary. He calls her from inside the Backrooms. Some part of him is reaching out. Some part of him knows he is trapped. Some part of him wants another person to see what is happening.

That is what makes it so heartbreaking.

Because wanting help and being able to change are not always the same thing.

Clark reaches for Mary, but he also keeps retreating deeper into the rooms. He wants someone to witness the maze, but he cannot seem to leave it. Or maybe he cannot fully imagine life outside it anymore. Maybe his brain cannot build that pathway. Maybe the injury, illness, grief, fear, shame, or whatever is happening inside him has altered the structure too much.

And yes, the symbolism lands harder when you remember what Clark wanted to be: an architect.

That is one of the mysteries science still has not fully solved for us. We can see parts of the brain. We can study neurons, synapses, patterns, chemicals, injury, memory, behavior. We can name some symptoms and track some decline. But we still cannot fully explain why one person can reach for change and another person, with just as much need and maybe just as much longing, cannot cross that threshold.

The space seems to understand Clark, copy him, rearrange him, and trap him in loops. Pathways repeat. Details shift. Lights flicker. Switches no longer do what they are supposed to do. The familiar becomes unreliable.

That is what made me think of dementia, specifically.

I want to be careful with that word, so I’ll come back to it in a moment. I am not diagnosing Clark, and I am not claiming this is what Parsons intended. I am saying the metaphor hit me hard because the Backrooms behave like a place where the mind’s familiar pathways have stopped behaving predictably.

You turn a corner and think you know where you are. You do not. You follow the same path and something is different. You reach for the switch and it no longer does what it once did. The lights hum. The walls repeat. The room is almost recognizable, but the context is gone.

That is not just a scary setting.

That is a profound horror.

Mary, Caregiving, and the Ache of Trying to Reach Someone

Mary is essential to this interpretation.

She is not just a therapist character dropped into the plot to ask concerned questions in soft lighting. She is someone who seems shaped by mental illness in her own family. The glimpses of her mother matter. Mary was raised close to instability, close to suffering, close to a kind of disorder she could not fix as a child.

So she becomes someone who tries to help others.

That is painfully human. Many people who grow up around untreated illness, addiction, trauma, or cognitive decline become hyper-attuned to other people’s pain. Some become helpers. Some become rescuers. Some become professionals. Some become all three, which is a very expensive emotional subscription plan.

But Backrooms does not romanticize that impulse.

Help Is Not a Key That Works on Every Door

Mary wants to help Clark, and Clark seems to want help too, at least part of him does. He reaches for her, leaves signs, and calls from inside the maze. But wanting help and being able to receive it are not the same thing. He may want a witness more than he wants transformation, or maybe his brain simply cannot find the pathway back.

This is one of the most painful truths about loving or treating someone in psychological distress: help is not a key that works on every door.

You can stand outside someone else’s maze with a flashlight, snacks, boundaries, and the most sincere intentions on earth. That does not mean the maze opens. That does not mean the person inside can hear you. That does not mean love becomes a map.

Caregiving makes this especially brutal. Cue up “The Caretaker – Everywhere At The End Of Time.” Thank you, Grace, for telling me that this music existed.

The Alzheimer’s Association reports that nearly 13 million Americans provide unpaid care for a family member or friend with dementia. The CDC also notes that unpaid caregiving is a major public health issue, with tens of millions of U.S. adults supporting loved ones who are older or living with chronic conditions or disabilities.

Mary’s role echoes that unbearable position: standing outside someone else’s interior maze, trying to reach them, knowing the map keeps changing.

Captain Clark and the Self That Turns Against Itself

Then there is Captain Clark.

This is where the film becomes more than atmospheric horror. Captain Clark is not simply an entity. He reads like Clark, or part of Clark, or the performance of Clark made monstrous.

The Persona Becomes the Monster

That detail matters.

The persona is not random. It is a version of Clark he created, maybe to sell furniture, maybe to survive humiliation, maybe to turn himself into something more powerful than he felt. But in the Backrooms, that persona becomes autonomous. It becomes violent. It becomes the thing that destroys him.

To me, that is where the movie becomes a story about mental illness and self-destruction.

Not in a tidy clinical way. Not in a “let’s diagnose the fictional man in the haunted carpet maze” way. We are not doing that. My eyeliner is bold, but my boundaries are intact and I’ve dealt with my own inner conflict and mental warfare enough not to judge or try to explain something that I have not studied or lived personally.

Emotionally, though, the symbolism feels devastatingly clear: sometimes the part of a person that is suffering is not the same part that is willing to be saved.

Clark brings Mary into the Backrooms. He wants, at least on some level, to show her what is happening. But the part of him that is rage, shame, refusal, and collapse cannot accept help.

That is horror with teeth and claws.

Why Dementia Is Such a Powerful Lens for Backrooms

So, separately, outside of mental illnesses that we often hear about, like depression, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and so many others. There are other illnesses that deeply impact the brain. Dementia is uniquely difficult to represent because it attacks the tools a person would need to explain it.

I am not in the medical profession, and I know dementia is not categorized as a mental illness. I am not using dementia, trauma, and mental illness as interchangeable terms, because they are not interchangeable. Dementia is a neurodegenerative condition that can affect cognition, memory, language, behavior, and daily functioning. Mental illnesses have their own distinct causes, experiences, treatments, and stigmas.

Dementia is also not a single disease. The CDC describes it as an overall term for decline in mental ability that interferes with daily life, affecting memory, thinking, and behavior. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia. The Alzheimer’s Association similarly describes dementia as an umbrella term for symptoms caused by different diseases, including Alzheimer’s.

What I am trying to name is something broader and, frankly, more frightening: the brain itself is an incredibly powerful organ, and we still do not fully understand it. We can study neurons, synapses, memory, chemistry, trauma responses, cognitive decline, and behavior, but there is still so much mystery in how a person’s inner world is built, altered, protected, or lost.

That is why Backrooms feels terrifying to me. It turns the mystery of the brain into something you can wander into and may not know how to leave.

Dementia is uniquely difficult to represent because it attacks the tools a person would need to explain it.

A person may be able to describe early confusion, fear, or forgetfulness. But as dementia progresses, memory and language can become less reliable. The Alzheimer’s Association notes that dementia can involve memory loss, confusion, delusions, and hallucinations in some people.

That is the impossible bind: once you are deep enough inside the maze, you may no longer be able to describe the maze. You may no longer be able to escape it.

Backrooms literalizes that terror.

The Rules Keep Changing

The rooms are not just scary because they are endless. They are scary because their logic keeps slipping.

They are not irrational, exactly. They have rules. They have patterns. But the rules do not remain stable enough for the trapped person to master them.

That is what made the flickering lights and broken switches feel so loaded to me. In the Backrooms, a switch does not always do what a switch is supposed to do. A light flickers on, then off, then on again, like the space itself is trying to connect and misfiring.

And how does the brain work, really? Through neurons firing, signals passing across synapses, pathways lighting up so memory, language, recognition, and emotion can communicate with one another. When those pathways are disrupted, the familiar can become unreliable. The switch is still there. The room is still there. But the connection does not hold the way it used to.

That is why those details matter. The lights are not just atmosphere. The faulty switches are not just set dressing. They feel like a visual language for a brain struggling to send and receive its own messages.

That is what families often experience around dementia and severe mental illness, too. There are patterns. There are triggers. There are moments of recognition. There are moments when the person you love is there, and then suddenly somewhere else.

The light flickers on.

The light flickers off.

The film captures that feeling without turning it into a speech.

The Photocopies of Memory

One of the strongest ways to understand Backrooms is through the idea of memory as a photocopy of a photocopy.

We do not simply replay the past. We reconstruct it. We copy it, revise it, emphasize different details, lose some parts, sharpen others, and sometimes mistake the copy for the original.

That is not just sad, it is also deeply human.

The Backrooms Are Context Without Story

Parsons has connected liminal spaces to memories that feel unmoored from clear context. In The Playlist interview, he discussed early-life memories that are not quite linked to identifiable parts of life, which is exactly the kind of thought that makes the Backrooms feel less like a monster closet and more like a brain trying to file its own broken folders.

That is one of the best keys to the film.

The Backrooms are not just empty spaces. They are contextless spaces.

They feel like places from childhood, work, school, waiting rooms, basements, showrooms, offices, hotels, and dreams. But they are severed from the stories that would make them make sense.

A place without context becomes threatening.

A hallway without an origin or destination becomes a trap.

A room without meaning becomes a symptom.

Did Kane Parsons Intend This?

Here is the honest answer: I do not know.

I found no reliable public evidence that Parsons has said Backrooms is specifically about dementia or Alzheimer’s or a form of mental illness. I also found no reliable public evidence that he has disclosed a personal connection to these things.

The responsible claim is that Parsons made a movie about memory, psychological space, and the terror of watching meaning slip out of places that used to make sense. For viewers who have lived near dementia, mental illness, caregiving, or trauma, that horror may feel unmistakable.

What he has said is still deeply relevant.

Why Backrooms Matters

A lot of adults still underestimate internet-born art. They hear “Backrooms” and think meme. Game. YouTube. Kid stuff.

But young people’s horror is often where culture processes the things adults have failed to explain.

School fear. Climate dread. Algorithmic life. Isolation. Surveillance. Broken institutions. Family instability. Mental illness. The feeling that reality itself has trapdoors.

The Backrooms work because they are not just a monster world. They are a metaphor engine.

Gen Z Horror Is Telling Us Something

For a 13-year-old, the horror may begin with the thrill of recognizing a digital myth brought to life.

For a parent, it may become something else: a story about watching a person disappear inside themselves. A story about trying to help someone who cannot or will not come back. A story about the limits of care, language, and love.

And that is why the movie stayed with me.

It was not really about a game.

It was about the rooms behind the rooms. The hallways we inherit. The doors our families leave open. The ones we close. The ones that stop working. The ones we keep trying anyway.

And maybe that is why Backrooms feels so haunting. It understands that the scariest place is not always somewhere outside reality.

Sometimes it is the back room of your own mind.

And sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is keep looking for the exit without forgetting they deserved one in the first place.

If this subject touches something personal for you or someone you love, support exists. In the U.S., call or text 988 for immediate mental health crisis support.

Why Backrooms May Not Work for Everyone

I can understand why some people probably did not like Backrooms.

This is not your average horror movie. It is not built around clean jump scares, easy answers, or a monster who politely arrives on schedule so everyone knows when to scream. It is slower, stranger, and much more psychological. It asks the audience to sit in discomfort instead of releasing that discomfort every few minutes with a loud noise and a musical sting.

For some viewers, that may feel frustrating. If you go in wanting a traditional horror rhythm, Backrooms might feel too abstract, too quiet, or too unwilling to explain itself. It does not hand you a neat mythology packet with labeled tabs.

But for me, that is exactly why the whole concept was terrifying.

The horror is not only what might be hiding around the corner. The horror is the corner itself. The hallway. The repeated room. The switch that no longer behaves like a switch. The light that flickers like a thought trying to complete itself.

That kind of fear does not always make you jump out of your seat. Sometimes it follows you home, waits until the house is quiet and everyone has gone to bed, then taps you gently on the shoulder like, “Remember me?”

And I did.

The Official Trailer

The post Kane Parsons Built a Maze. I Saw a Mind Unraveling first appeared on Scrink.com.

Apparently, my body had other ideas.

I know this has happened before. I get stressed. I keep pushing. I convince myself I can just muscle through whatever is happening. I ignore the warning lights blinking all over the dashboard, and then eventually my body goes, “Cute story. Anyway, you are sitting down now.”

This time, it did that with shingles.

The Symptoms Were So Much Worse Than I Expected

What really threw me is that it did not start where I expected.

It started in my left ear. I genuinely thought I had an ear infection at first. Then the pain moved into the left side of my throat. After that, it crept up the back of my head.

When I saw my primary care doctor, I traced the line of pain with my finger. She pulled up dermatome maps on her computer and showed me how the pain was following dermatomes V2 and V3. So apparently, I got a surprise anatomy lesson with my shingles diagnosis. A deeply unpleasant bonus feature from hell.

I had no idea shingles could present like this.

And what I really did not know is that the pain and flu-like symptoms can show up before any blistering happens. You can have chills, fever, headaches, exhaustion, body aches, burning nerve pain, and generally feel like absolute garbage before there is anything visible on your skin at all.

In some cases, the blistering barely happens or does not happen much at all.

Which honestly makes the whole experience feel even more disorienting, because you are sitting there in immense pain with almost nothing external to point at. You start wondering if you are overreacting. You feel a little bit crazy because your body is screaming and there is no dramatic visual evidence to match the level of pain.

Meanwhile, your nervous system is over here acting like it has been personally betrayed.

And then I learned another rude little fact. In the U.S., the shingles vaccine is generally recommended for adults 50 and older, unless someone is immunocompromised and qualifies earlier. I am 45, so apparently I am old enough for the pain but not old enough for the prevention. Love that for me.

Since being diagnosed, I have heard from dozens of people who had shingles before turning 50. Some have had it more than once. So yes, when I do qualify, this is definitely one of those vaccines I will be getting, unless I suddenly become someone who is into feeling this kind of pain. Which, to be clear, I am not.

The pain is making me a little bit crazy, if I am being honest. It burns constantly. Touching my head or neck feels like scraping fingernails across a sunburn. Swallowing hurts. My ear canal feels like someone shoved a narrow hot curling iron directly into it and left it there for fun.

Zero stars. Absolutely do not recommend.

What has surprised me most is how invisible this kind of pain can look from the outside. You can still answer texts. You can still attempt to do normal things. Meanwhile, your nervous system is staging a full rebellion.

And because I tend to minimize what I am experiencing, I initially thought maybe I was just run down or fighting allergies.

That assumption was not exactly helped by urgent care.

Urgent Care Told Me It Was Allergies

I went to urgent care because something clearly felt wrong. The pain was escalating, and my body was waving red flags like it was directing planes on an airport runway.

I was told to take Flonase for allergies.

Several days later, I saw my primary care doctor, who took one look and immediately knew it was shingles.

That moment was validating and infuriating all at once.

I understand healthcare workers are overwhelmed. I know diagnostic mistakes happen. I am not interested in dragging exhausted medical professionals for sport. Two things can be true. Systems can be strained, and patients can still fall through the cracks.

But there is something especially unsettling about knowing your body is sounding an alarm while feeling dismissed anyway.

Particularly for women. Particularly for people who are used to downplaying pain so they do not get labeled as dramatic. Or simply because they don’t have a choice. They have to keep pushing. Any other single moms out there? Am I right?

Apparently My Fitbit and Google Health Have Joined the Intervention

You all know I normally work out four to five times a week, usually kickboxing. Movement is one of the ways I manage stress and stay grounded in myself.

So naturally, I tried to bargain with reality by attempting a 20-minute workout yesterday.

My body was deeply unimpressed.

Honestly, my Fitbit was also offended.

This morning, the Google Health app basically sat me down like a disappointed auntie and informed me that I need to rest and focus on recovery because several of my health metrics are off right now. My resting heart rate is higher. My heart rate variability is lower. Everything is apparently flashing warning signs except me, because I was still over here trying to negotiate with shingles like I was haggling at a flea market.

I am highly amused that artificial intelligence is now participating in telling me to sit down.

And honestly, I think there is something valuable there.

AI in Healthcare Cannot Replace Humans, but It Can Notice Patterns

I do not want AI replacing doctors. I want doctors to have support, better systems, and enough time to actually listen to patients.

But I also think there is real potential in technology that notices patterns we might ignore.

My watch noticed my recovery markers were off before I was emotionally ready to admit how bad I felt. It tracked changes in heart rate variability, stress, sleep quality, and recovery strain without ego getting involved. There is no little internal voice in the app going, “Well technically you can probably still power through.”

Human beings do that. Especially people who are used to surviving hard things.

Technology does not always know why something is wrong, but sometimes it can help flag that something is wrong before we fully crash into a wall.

I Am Trying to Learn the Lesson Before My Body Gets Louder

Here is the thing.

I know how to endure. A lot of us do. Especially people who have spent years carrying responsibilities, caregiving, stress, grief, financial pressure, discrimination, trauma, or all of the above stacked together like emotional Jenga.

What I am less skilled at is stopping before my body forces the issue.

There is a difference between resilience and self-abandonment. I am still learning where that line is.

Right now, my job is not to “push through.” My job is to recover. To rest without treating rest like a moral failure. To stop arguing with the evidence sitting directly in front of me.

And maybe to let the tiny judgmental robot in my watch win this round.

If you are someone who keeps going long after your body starts asking for help, I hope you listen sooner than I did. Not because resting makes you weak. Because ignoring yourself is not strength.

The post Shingles at 45 and Learning to Sit Down first appeared on Scrink.com.

Having been born in early 1981 means I have spent my whole life standing in the strange little doorway between Gen X and Millennials, not quite able to fully claim either room without someone checking the birth-year chart and getting weird about it. Me. I’m someone. I can never remember which generational span I belong in.

I understand that someone somewhere drew a line and said, “Here. This is where one generation ends and another begins.” Fine. Put me in the Millennial folder if you must. But emotionally? Culturally? Spiritually, while standing in a family room with wood paneling and a TV Guide on the coffee table turned to find when Who’s The Boss will be airing? I am absolutely part of that odd little bridge group that remembers life before the internet took over, but also came of age just as everything started moving online.

Maybe I will just make up my own generation as a joke. Generation Christennial. Or ChrX, which sounds slightly like a rejected superhero team with excellent eyeliner and a loud ass dial-up modem.

But the real point is not the name. The real point is that some of us grew up in an analog world, became adults in a digital one, and had to keep adapting without ever getting a formal orientation packet. We went from landlines to smartphones, from handwritten notes to group chats, from film cameras to camera rolls with 14,000 photos, and somehow we are still expected to remember all our passwords while figuring out what the heck AI is all about and how it’s destroying the environment and terminating jobs that we desperately need to hold onto because we only have 15 more years until we can retire!

And honestly, that explains a lot about us.

We Remember Childhood Before Everything Was Online

I miss the texture of that childhood sometimes. Not because it was perfect, because please, let us not pretend the 80s and 90s were one long wholesome cereal commercial. They were not; the number of kids who were latchkey kids, fending for themselves, was alarming. I was lucky, my mom was always home, even when she went back to work because she had a home daycare. But there was a pace to things that feels almost impossible to explain now without sounding like I am trying to sell someone a rotary phone on Etsy with words like “nostalgia” and “vintage.”

We had landlines. We had Saturday morning cartoons with built-in morals. We had Walkmans, then Discman upgrades, then the wild magic of MP3 players that made us feel like we had personally been invited into the future. Music was something you waited for, collected, borrowed, taped, burned, and carried around like evidence of who you were trying to become.

There was a real art to waiting by the radio with one finger hovering over the record button. You had to be ready. You had to be committed. You had to accept that the DJ might talk over the intro and ruin your entire emotional experience. And then you put tape over the little hole in the cassette so no one could tape over your hard work.

We had AIM away messages that did far too much emotional labor for a few lines of text. We heard “You’ve got mail” and felt a tiny thrill, because email still seemed like a door opening instead of a haunted closet full of school notices, password resets, and coupons from places you visited once in 2014.

We typed school papers on word processors while massive Encyclopedia Britannica volumes sat nearby like an entire wall of authority. Then, little by little, computers arrived in our homes and classrooms, looking less like sleek devices and more like office equipment that had wandered into domestic life and decided to stay. I remember my first hella expensive Gateway, I bought it with my own money, it was EXPENSIVE, it came in a box decorated like a cow. No, I don’t know why.

We spent quality time dying of dysentery on Oregon Trail and chasing Carmen Sandiego around the globe. For a lot of us, that was educational gaming. We learned geography, problem solving, and the harsh truth that no matter how carefully you packed your wagon, someone named Silas or Ophelia was probably not making it to Oregon.

No offense to them. The trail was rough.

School Required Patience, Index Cards, And A Strong Relationship With The Library

Research used to be a whole event. You did not just open a browser and type a question into a search bar. You went to the library, walked through the stacks, pulled books from shelves, and hoped the one source you needed had not already been checked out by someone in the other fourth-grade class.

The Dewey Decimal System was not a quaint idea. It was survival. There was a card catalog in wooden drawers; do not even think about leaving the index card on top, you learn to put that away. Eventually, you might have had a computer catalog if your library was feeling fancy, either way, you had to know how to look for things in a way that required actual thought. You could not just ask the algorithm to understand your messy little half-question. You had to narrow it down yourself, write down the call number, and go hunting.

We had overhead projectors in math class, and there was something weirdly dramatic about them. The teacher would roll one in, place a clear sheet on top, and suddenly their hand was enormous on the wall, writing equations in that squeaky marker ink that always looked slightly too wet. And those markers had such a distinct smell. Every classroom had its own little theater of transparency film and mild eye strain. Take those notes down before the teacher grabs a wet paper towel and wipes it all away.

Some of us were pulled into Gifted and Talented programs where we were asked to write research papers about Marie Curie and learn algebra while still young enough to need help remembering our lunch money. I have complicated affection for that. On one hand, I loved being treated like my brain could do interesting things. On the other hand, there is something very funny and slightly tragic about a child being handed a citation format before she has mastered emotional regulation.

Tiny stressed-out academics, all of us. Someone should have given us juice boxes and a union. Though, not gonna lie, my high school also had us drinking milk from plastic milk pouches that were entirely too similar to breast implants.

Making Plans Used To Require Commitment

My kids look at me like I am crazy every time I tell them I need notice. I can’t just make plans on the fly. Well, I can, I’m physically able, but it does cause great anxiety.

But there was a time when people could simply become unreachable, and we all accepted this as normal.

Plans had to be made ahead of time because once someone left the house, they were gone. Not gone in a mysterious way. Just gone in the regular, pre-cell-phone sense. They were at the mall, or the movies, or a friend’s house, or somewhere between all three, and unless they found a payphone and had a quarter to call you, you had no real-time updates.

Weekend plans were negotiated in school hallways, over landlines, and through carefully folded notes that felt more official than some legal documents. You had to know where you were meeting, when you were meeting, who was getting a ride, and what the backup plan was when somebody’s mom said no at the last minute.

There was no group text to rescue the chaos. No shared location. No “I’m five minutes away” message sent by someone who had not yet put on shoes. You either figured it out before everyone scattered, or you spent your Saturday wondering whether the plan was still happening while watching reruns and eating cereal out of a plastic bowl.

And somehow, we survived. We got left places occasionally, yes. Not accidentally, we were just dropped at movies, arcades or at the mall, because those were our own little community centers. We were welcomed and wanted there and for the most part we were respectful and responsible in those spaces. We stood by mall fountains, tossing in pennies and contemplating if we were too old for World of Science and the KB Toystore. But we also learned how to make decisions and stick to them, which feels like a lost art in a world where every plan now has seven revisions, three polls, and one person who responds with “maybe.”

Friendship Moved At The Speed Of Stamps, Notes, And Busy Signals

We had pen pals. Real ones. With stamps.

That sounds so simple, but it was intimate in a way I do not think we always appreciated at the time. You picked out stationery. You wrote by hand. You folded the paper, sealed the envelope, added a stamp, and sent your words into the world with absolutely no guarantee of a quick reply.

There was no typing bubble. No read receipt. No little heart reaction to reassure you that your message had landed. You waited. Days passed. Sometimes weeks. Then one afternoon, there it was, a letter with your name on it, and suddenly the whole day had a little sparkle around the edges.

Friendship took effort, but it also had room to breathe. You could miss someone without monitoring them. You could wonder what they were doing without checking their stories. You could sit on your bed and write everything down, not for an audience, not for engagement, just for one person who might understand.

I am not saying every old way was better. Some silences were painful. Some friendships faded because distance made things harder. But there was something beautiful about connection that required care instead of constant access.

Our Technology Grew Up Right Beside Us

What makes this little bridge generation so strange is that our technology changed at almost the same pace we did. We did not just watch the world update around us. We updated with it, awkwardly and constantly, like a computer that kept needing to restart at the worst possible moment.

We remember bulky cell phones with removable faceplates, which were somehow both ridiculous and thrilling. Changing the color of your phone felt like a personality shift. Were you translucent blue? Sparkly purple? Silver with attitude? These were not small choices. These were declarations. Remember when call-waiting happened, oh yeah, no sneaking calls to your crush and hanging up. And then phone companies added the ability to three-way call people. We all had that one friend who would three-way call but one member on the call didn’t know there was another person. So many confidences dashed! Tragic. No wonder I have trust issues.

GPS was a stack of MapQuest printouts sitting on the passenger seat. You highlighted the route, folded the pages badly, and prayed that the directions were accurate. Missing a turn was not a minor inconvenience. It was a full-body situation. Someone had to stay calm, someone had to read the next step out loud, and someone’s dad was probably going to insist he knew a shortcut. God forbid there is construction. Just turn around, man, go home, it wasn’t meant to be.

Photos were taken on film cameras, which meant you had to live with uncertainty. You did not know whether the picture came out until the film was developed. Someone might have blinked. Someone might have moved. Someone’s thumb might have taken up half the frame. Indoor photos sometimes involved flashes that made the whole room feel like a tiny science experiment, and every family gathering had at least one adult saying, “Take another one just in case.” Yes, I had a camera where you had to attach the flash bulbs and they literally exploded, they were called Flashcubes, look that up. You won’t believe it.

Now we take fifteen photos of the same plate of food and still complain that the lighting is weird.

We Had The Early Internet Before It Became Everyone’s Whole Life

The internet, when it first entered our lives, felt like a place you visited. You logged on. The modem screamed its little robot death song. You waited. You entered the online world for a while, and then at some point, someone needed the phone, so you had to leave.

There was something almost healthy about the inconvenience. Not always fun, but clarifying. The internet was not yet the weather system we all lived inside. It was a room you entered through effort.

Then came the social internet, and we brought our whole messy selves with us.

We had MySpace, where the Top 8 was less a feature and more a public emotional ranking system. Friendships were tested. Crushes were exposed. Bands were discovered. Profile songs made everyone deeply dramatic, which, to be fair, many of us already were. And honestly, this might be there first place I started dabbling in writing my own HTML code. Of course back then it was all very table heavy. Gah!

We had LiveJournal, where people wrote in ways that were cryptic, emotional, theatrical, sincere, and occasionally exhausting. It was part diary, part community board, part group therapy session run by people who absolutely were not qualified. Still, there was something tender about it. People were trying to tell the truth about their lives before everyone learned to polish truth into content.

We lived through screen names, buddy icons, away messages, burned CDs, floppy disks, hard disks, Y2K panic, and the uneasy feeling that technology was both exciting and slightly out of control.

Then we watched the internet stop being a place and become an atmosphere. It’s a 24/7 IV for so many people now.

We Came Of Age Through A Lot Of History

Being born in 1981 means the timeline has not exactly been gentle.

We saw Desert Storm unfold when we were still kids, watching war become part of the background noise of childhood living rooms. For me, that era is tied to something oddly personal, too. My first bit of writing was published in the school transcript during Desert Storm, which feels fitting in a strange way. I was learning that words mattered while the adults on television were showing us how quickly the world could change.

We were young enough to feel the future opening up, but old enough to remember where we were when certain things changed the air in the room. Many of us were college students or young adults around 9/11. We entered adulthood in a world that suddenly felt more fearful, more surveilled, and more politically charged. We can tell you exactly where we were. I was in Memorial Hall at the University of Delaware. It is etched into a dark place in my brain.

Then came the Great Recession, right as so many people our age were trying to build careers, pay rent, manage underwater mortgages, start families, or figure out what stability was supposed to look like in the first place. We were told to work hard, stay loyal, be grateful, and keep pushing, even as the floor kept shifting under our feet.

And that pattern never really stopped. We have lived through a lot of wars, a lot of national fear, a lot of flags on screens, and a lot of complicated grief that people were often expected to process quietly while still going to school, going to work, paying bills, and acting normal.

A lot of us worked multiple jobs. We stretched paychecks until they were practically see-through. We ate from dollar menus and then got lectured about wellness by people who had pensions, affordable college, cheaper houses, and the nerve to act like avocado toast had personally destroyed the economy. Which, respectfully, no.

Later, we lived through a pandemic that rearranged daily life, grief, work, parenting, friendship, school, caregiving, and the basic act of being around other people. It did not just interrupt normal life. It exposed how fragile “normal” had already become.

And now there is this strange push to shove everyone back into old structures, as if the last few years were a weird detour instead of a permanent rupture. Offices, meetings, rigid schedules, forced togetherness, all of it keeps being sold as a return to connection. But for many of us, that era is over. Not because we hate people. Not because we forgot how to be in community. Because we learned the difference between connection and control.

We learned that work can happen without fluorescent lights. We learned that rest is not laziness. We learned that families, bodies, disabilities, caregiving, grief, and mental health do not fit neatly inside someone else’s preferred schedule. We learned that “back to normal” often means back to ignoring the people who were barely surviving normal in the first place.

We also grew up watching major policy and cultural shifts that expanded rights, protections, visibility, and possibility for people who had been pushed to the margins for too long. That mattered. It still matters. So it is especially jarring now to watch some of those gains being challenged, weakened, or rolled back. There is a particular kind of heartbreak in realizing progress is not a straight line, and rights are not as permanent as we were told they were.

Maybe that is part of why our generation feels so tired and so alert at the same time. We have seen enough change to know things can get better. We have also seen enough backlash to know better is never guaranteed.

Some things simply should not go back to the way they were. Change and adaptation can be really good.

And then came AI

And now here we are, standing in the middle of the AI era, watching yet another massive shift unfold in real time while still trying to remember which app controls the thermostat. It feels a little like we climbed into the DeLorean by accident, hit 88 miles per hour, and landed in a future that looks familiar enough to function in but strange enough to make us whisper, “Great Scott, who approved this?”

Because yes, it is incredible. It is also deeply weird.

We were raised on the idea that the future would announce itself with flying cars, hoverboards, and sneakers that tied themselves. Instead, the future showed up as a chatbot that can summarize your inbox, a refrigerator that wants Wi-Fi, and a smart light that has apparently developed its own emotional boundaries.

I ask Google for the weather. I ask Siri to set a timer. I ask ChatGPT to help me write alt text for a complicated image that I want to make accessible. Meanwhile, I am still manually resetting passwords, yelling “representative” into automated phone systems, and trying to figure out why one smart light has decided it lives in a different time zone.

That is the strange little Back to the Future feeling of being born in 1981. We remember the past clearly enough to miss parts of it, but we are fluent enough in the future to know how to survive it. We are Marty McFly staring at the town square, recognizing the shape of the place while realizing all the rules have changed.

It is a lot. It has always been a lot. And maybe that is why people in this bridge group often carry such a strange mix of competence and exhaustion. We know how to adapt because we have been doing it forever. We also know enough to be suspicious when someone announces that the next big thing will make life easier for everyone, because historically, “everyone” tends to be doing some very heavy lifting in that sentence.

We May Be One Of The Last Generations With Real Childhood Privacy

This is the part I keep coming back to, because it feels bigger than nostalgia.

We may be one of the last generations whose childhood mistakes were not automatically uploaded, screenshotted, archived, and dragged into the future. Our bad haircuts lived in photo albums. Our bad moods stayed in bedrooms, notebooks, slammed doors, or long phone calls with friends who understood when to just let us ramble on. Not short-hand texts with zero context or depth.

Our bad choices were not always preserved in the cloud. Our awkward phases did not become searchable proof that we were once unfinished human beings. We had cringe, of course. We had so much cringe. We simply had the mercy of limited distribution.

There is something profound about that.

I think about kids now and feel that little squeeze in my chest. Their awkward years have an audience. Their conflicts come with receipts. Their grief, joy, friendships, crushes, opinions, jokes, mistakes, and worst moments can become content before they fully understand what they are handing over.

That does not mean we had it easy. Plenty of harm happened offline. Bullying existed. Shame existed. Family dysfunction, racism, homophobia, class pressure, sexism, and cruelty all existed without needing Wi-Fi. I never want nostalgia to turn into a lie where the past gets softened so much that people who suffered inside it disappear.

But I do think we had more room to become ourselves away from permanent public documentation. We could mess up, apologize, change, and keep growing without every version of us being treated like evidence for interrogation to be picked apart.

That kind of privacy was not a small thing. It was a form of grace.

The Best Part Of The Bridge Is The Perspective

I do not want to go backward. I like modern convenience. I like being able to look things up, find directions, text friends, take too many pictures of my dogs, and order something oddly specific without having to speak to a human being. I am not trying to churn butter in the yard while complaining about TikTok.

At the same time, I do not want to pretend nothing was lost.

There was value in boredom. There was value in waiting. There was value in making a plan and keeping it. There was value in not knowing what everyone was doing all the time. There was value in having parts of yourself that did not need to be posted, performed, optimized, or explained.

Being part of this bridge generation means we can hold both truths. We can appreciate technology without worshiping it. We can remember the analog world without pretending it was kinder than it was. We can use GPS and still know that a printed map once saved somebody’s entire vacation. We can send memes and still believe handwritten letters had a particular magic.

We are old enough to remember life before the feed and young enough to understand why the feed became addictive.

That is not a bad place to stand, even if the lighting is weird and someone keeps asking us to update our software.

Born In 1981 Means Living With One Foot In Each World

I think the real feeling of being born in 1981 is not confusion so much as translation.

We are always translating between eras. We remember what it was like when phones belonged to houses instead of people. We remember when photos were developed, not deleted. We remember when school research involved books, not tabs. We remember when a person could leave the house and become temporarily unknowable.

We also know the modern world. We have adapted to it, worked in it, parented through it, loved people through it, and built lives inside it. We know how to Google what we do not know. We know how to troubleshoot. We know how to pivot, even when we are sick of pivoting and would rather sit quietly with a snack.

That is the thing about this little bridge group. We have lived through enough change to know that identity is not always cleanly labeled. Sometimes you are the kid with the Walkman who became the adult with the smartphone. Sometimes you are the person who remembers Oregon Trail and now has to understand AI. Sometimes you are technically a Millennial, emotionally Gen X-adjacent, and personally just trying to drink your coffee before it gets cold.

So fine. Call us Xennials. Call us elder Millennials. Call us the Oregon Trail generation. Call us whatever makes the chart happy.

I will be over here calling myself Generation Christennial as a private little joke, because after surviving landlines, MapQuest, MySpace, Y2K, 9/11, a recession, a pandemic, and the rise of machines that now offer to write emails for us, I think I have earned the right to be a little flippant.

Born in 1981 meant an analog childhood, a digital adulthood, and just enough chaos to keep things interesting.

The post Born in 1981: The Analog Childhood and Digital Adulthood of a Bridge Generation first appeared on Scrink.com.

She explained that every person receives communication through their own filters. What they hear is shaped by their life experience, their mood, their stress level, whether they slept the night before, and whether my words brush up against something tender, or perhaps unresolved. So even when I speak with care, my words may not always land in neutral territory. They may land inside another person’s real life, which includes whatever they have gone through or whatever they are currently enduring.

The Four Agreements make you think about your words

The first agreement, be impeccable with your word, sounds simple until you are actually trying to live it. Then suddenly you are choosing words carefully, trying not to accuse, trying not to soften the truth so much that it disappears, and trying to stay honest without becoming harsh.

What helped me today was thinking about “impeccable” as accountable, not perfect. I do not think it means I will always say everything beautifully. I think it means I am responsible for trying to speak with honesty, care, and as little harm as possible. I’m not perfect; there have been many times when I speak impulsively without thinking. They say hindsight is 20/20, after all.

That matters, especially when conversations involve pain, power, or consequences. Words can protect people, and words can also corner them. Words can clarify, and words can also erase. When we are talking about immigrants, marginalized communities, trauma, grief, race, class, disability, gender, faith, or survival, language is not just decoration. Language decides who gets believed, who gets blamed, and who gets asked to carry the discomfort.

So yes, I want to be kind, but I also want to be clear.

Honest communication still has to survive other people’s filters

The second agreement, do not take anything personally, is the one I had to sit with for a minute. At first, it can sound like it is asking me to detach from the impact of my words or pretend that hurt feelings do not matter. That is not something I can get behind.

But the way my therapist explained it gave me something more useful. She was not telling me to ignore impact or act like words do not hurt. She was reminding me that another person’s reaction is shaped by more than my intention.

That does not excuse harm. It does not mean I get to say whatever I want and then blame the other person for how they received it. Accountability still matters. Repair and care still matter.

It does mean that communication is never clean math. I often say that very few things in life are black and white. I can say something with care, and someone can still hear criticism. I can name a boundary, and someone can hear abandonment. I can ask for accountability, and someone can hear rejection. Sometimes that is because I need to communicate better. Sometimes it is because their history is standing between us.

Often, it is both.

The hard part is caring without collapsing

Here is the thing. Understanding, or trying to learn about, someone else’s filters does not mean abandoning my own reality.

I can care about how something landed and still know what I meant. I can apologize for harm without apologizing for having a need. I can listen to someone’s pain without volunteering to become the villain in their version of the story.

That distinction matters to me because I know how easy it is to confuse compassion with self-erasure. A lot of us were trained to believe that being loving means being endlessly available, endlessly understanding, and endlessly willing to make ourselves smaller so nobody else feels uncomfortable.

That is not love. That is a hostage situation with nicer lighting.

Real compassion has a spine. It asks me to care about my impact, tell the truth, and stay connected to my own dignity. It asks me to notice who gets hurt when people avoid hard conversations, especially the people who are already expected to absorb discomfort quietly.

Because silence is not always neutral. Sometimes silence protects power. Sometimes silence teaches the most vulnerable person in the room that everyone else’s comfort matters more than their safety.

Difficult conversations reveal what a relationship can hold

I think one reason difficult conversations scare me is that they show me the truth about the relationship. Not the polite truth. Not the “we should totally get coffee soon” truth. The real one.

When I am honest with someone, I find out whether there is room for both of us in the conversation. I find out whether we can misunderstand each other and still care enough to repair it. I find out whether I can say something hard without being punished for not wrapping it in enough bubble wrap first.

And I find out whether the other person can tell me how I affected them without handing me every wound they have ever carried and calling it an invoice. And this goes both ways. Because I, too, have a difficult time letting go of things where I have felt wronged. They stay with me and I know I give them too much power.

So, naturally, this part is hard for me. Family and friendship matter to me, but I am learning that boundaries matter, too. I want relationships where honesty is not treated like betrayal. I want there to be room for awkwardness, repair, and growth. I want the kind of connection where someone can say, “That hurt,” and I can say, “Help me understand,” without either of us reaching for a flamethrower or screaming.

Not every relationship can hold that. Sometimes the conversation reveals care. Sometimes it reveals avoidance. Sometimes it shows me that I have been working overtime to maintain peace with someone who benefits from my silence.

That is painful information, but it is still information.

I am learning that impact matters, and so does intention

The more I sit with the first two agreements, the more I see that they are not opposites. Being impeccable with my word asks me to take responsibility for what I say. Not taking things personally asks me to remember that I am not the decision maker of how someone receives it.

Both can be true.

If someone tells me my words hurt them, I want to listen. I want to understand what happened. I want to repair what I can. I do not want to hide behind good intentions, as if they are a permission slip.

But I also do not want to hand over my entire sense of self every time someone reacts strongly. A reaction can be real without becoming a printed line in the way I am defined. A feeling can deserve care without becoming the final ruling on my character.

That feels important, especially for those of us who learned to scan every facial expression, every text response, every shift in tone, and immediately assume we were in trouble. There is a difference between being accountable and being emotionally drafted into someone else’s weather system.

I am trying to learn that difference.

The invitation is to stay honest and stay human

The Four Agreements will not magically make difficult conversations less difficult. I am still a person, not a spiritually enlightened customer service kiosk.

But the first two agreements gave me a clearer frame. I can be careful with my words. I can care about my impact. I can remember that people hear me through their own filters. I can stop treating every misunderstanding as proof that I failed.

That does not mean I become careless. It means I stop confusing control with responsibility. Novel, right?

My responsibility is to speak with honesty, care, and accountability. My responsibility is to listen when someone tells me how my words landed. My responsibility is also to stay rooted in what I know to be true, especially when a difficult conversation gets messy. Additionally, it is my responsibility to be clear and honest, which sometimes means admitting I was wrong.

And maybe that is the invitation. To tell the truth without cruelty. To listen without collapsing. To care about other people’s filters without making ourselves disappear inside them.

The post The Four Agreements and Difficult Conversations first appeared on Scrink.com.

My therapist recently asked me what makes me happy. Then she asked the harder question, which was why I do not think I am worth happiness. That second question is its own locked room, and I am not kicking that door open all at once. But the first one? I knew the answer almost immediately. Music. Loud. In the car. Windows up or down depending on the mood or pollen levels, shoulders tense until the right chorus lands, then one long exhale like my body remembers it is allowed to be here.

The funny part is, I do not always like driving. New places can make me anxious. Unfamiliar streets. The slow dawning horror of not knowing where I will park. A truly humbling character-building experience, honestly. But when I am alone in the car with music loud enough to drown out the static in my head, driving becomes something else. It becomes motion without interruption. Feeling without witnesses. One of the few places where I can cry and not immediately feel observed.

This playlist is not random. It is an emotional map.

My therapist gave me homework. Build a Christy playlist, then write about it. Which is either very helpful or a deeply suspicious thing to ask a writer, because now every song feels like evidence.

And once I stopped looking at the playlist like a pile of tracks and started listening to what it was actually saying, the shape became obvious. This is not a playlist built around one mood. It is a playlist built around emotional truth.

It opens with lift. “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” “Baby Steps,” and “Friday I’m in Love” all bring in warmth, momentum, and that quick little rise in the chest that feels like hope before your brain can interrupt it. But even those songs are not empty happiness. They carry longing, tenderness, and the kind of brightness that feels real because it does not pretend to last forever.

Then the middle of the playlist widens emotionally. “Messy,” “Chicago,” “Epiphany,” “COMPASS,” “Foolish Pleasure,” and “Little by Little” do not all say the same thing, but they are all circling some version of this question: how do you keep moving when your inner life is loud? There is self-concept pain here. A hunger for steadiness. Permission to want pleasure anyway. The long, unglamorous work of surviving things little by little instead of all at once.

Then comes the stretch that really tells on me. “Never Gonna Give You Up,” “End of Beginning,” “Remember That Night?,” “LET EM GO,” “If You Want Love,” “Homewrecker,” “Baby Come Back,” “nothing left to say,” and “Somebody Else” move through memory, attachment, emotional relapse, release, longing, and the humiliating fact that sometimes you can know a thing is hurting you and still want it back. This part of the playlist understands that healing is not a straight line. Sometimes it is one text, one memory, one familiar ache, and suddenly your whole body is back in a room you thought you had left.

And then the playlist goes for the deepest bruises. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is not the centerpiece, but it absolutely belongs because it is not just a party song. It is lonely yearning in a glittering pop rush. “undressed” carries the fear of starting over when your body still wants the familiar ache. “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” turns memory into movement and makes a past love live in the muscles. “Take Aim” is one of the rawest songs here, not because it is loud, but because it is intimate in such a devastating way. “Freakin Out” sounds like activation itself, like the body trying to discharge what the mind cannot neatly explain. And now “Delete Ya” and “Be Slow” close the playlist with two equally important truths: one wants distance so badly it becomes obsessive, and the other asks for tenderness without force, closeness without panic, love without being rushed past your own capacity.

So no, this playlist is not me trying to convince anyone I am fine. It is me trying to tell the truth with better production.

Because for a long time, I think I treated happiness like it had to be something acceptable to everyone else around me. Untouched by fear. Untouched by trauma. Untouched by the mess. But that is not how my actual life works. And maybe it is not how happiness works at all.

What the songs seem to say about me

If I line these songs up like little emotional witnesses, a few patterns start to emerge.

I do not want fake positivity. I want emotional truth.

That is probably the clearest thing in this whole list. Even my brighter songs have longing in them. Even my fun songs have ache in their bloodstream. I am not drawn to music that tells me everything is okay when it is obviously not. I want songs that tell the truth first and then, maybe, offer me a hand.

That is why “Messy” matters. It is not polished. It is not asking for a gold star for being easy to handle. It is self-aware and jagged and tired of pretending. That is why “nothing left to say” matters too. It sounds like the point where feeling has outrun language. That is why “Friday I’m in Love” works in this mix, because it feels like relief, not denial. Happiness for me is not convincing. Happiness for me is interruptive. It cuts through the static for a minute and says, “Hey. You are still in there.”

I am drawn to movement more than resolution

Look at the titles alone and the pattern is right there, but the songs back it up too. “Baby Steps.” “Little by Little.” “End of Beginning.” “LET EM GO.” “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Even “Delete Ya” is movement, just a harsher kind. It is the desire to erase, detach, scrub someone out of the bloodstream because carrying them hurts too much.

That feels true to my life. I am not standing in some gorgeous finish-line moment where I can say I have healed and mean it in a clean, cinematic way. I am in process. I am mid-exhale. I am trying to build a life while still carrying things that hurt. So maybe it makes sense that the songs I choose are not songs about being done. They are songs about continuing. They are songs about surviving by staying in motion, even when the motion is messy.

My attachment wound has a soundtrack

There, I said it with my whole chest.

This playlist is full of wanting. Not clean wanting either. Not the cute kind. I mean the kind that embarrasses you a little. The kind that makes memory feel physical. The kind that leaves you sitting at a red light with a tight jaw because a lyric hit too hard and now your eyes are doing that hot thing.

“Remember That Night?” is emotional relapse. “If You Want Love” knows intimacy costs something. “Homewrecker” sits in moral tension and desire at the same time. “Somebody Else” understands that a relationship can be over and still live under your skin. “undressed” aches with reluctance to begin again. “Delete Ya” adds another layer to that, because it is not peaceful closure. It is the frustrated fantasy of deleting somebody from your system when they have already made themselves at home there. And “Take Aim” says the quiet part out loud: sometimes wanting closeness can blur into self-erasure. Sometimes being seen and being wounded get tangled together in ways that are very hard to explain to people who have only ever loved safely.

I need to pause on “Take Aim” because this is where surface reading fails. “Take Aim” is not casual intensity. It is devastation. It is surrender. It is the terrible intimacy of wanting the very thing that breaks you apart. That song does not sit at the edge of the playlist. It is one of its deepest nerve endings.

Joy still counts, even when it arrives messy

This may be the whole article, honestly.

For a long time, I think I treated happiness like it had to be pure to count. Untouched by trauma. Untouched by shame. Untouched by grief. Untouched by the very human mess of wanting things, missing people, resenting yourself, and trying again anyway.

But that is not how my actual happiness shows up.

It shows up when Whitney Houston comes on and for three minutes yearning gets to wear sequins. It shows up when The Cure gives me one shining pocket of ease. It shows up when Bad Bunny turns memory into motion and my shoulders drop half an inch. It shows up when I can sing loudly enough that the noise in my head has to take a number and wait its turn. Joy, for me, is not the absence of pain. It is the moment pain is not the only thing in the car.

That is its own kind of hope, even if it wears scuffed boots.

My playlist holds both armor and exposure

There is a fascinating push and pull in this mix. Some songs feel guarded. Some feel wide open. Some sound like flirtation, some like grief, some like a private spiral with a great hook. Put together, they suggest I am not one thing emotionally. I am not only soft, not only defended, not only romantic, not only tired. I am all of it depending on the hour, the traffic, the weather, and whether a certain bridge hits at exactly the wrong or right moment.

That tension feels especially clear now with “Delete Ya” and “Be Slow” sitting at the end together. One is sharp, restless, fed up with the persistence of memory. The other feels like an appeal for gentleness, for pacing, for not being pushed faster than the heart can safely travel. That pairing feels painfully honest to me. Part of me wants to cut the cord with one clean swipe. Part of me wants softness, patience, and room to breathe. The playlist knows that about me, even when I do not want to say it out loud.

My nervous system likes a container

The car is a container.

No eye contact. No immediate response required. No one asking me to summarize my feelings in a voice calm enough to make them comfortable. My hands have something to do. My body has a task. The road is moving beneath me. The music is louder than the shame for once.

That is why this works.

The car takes all this intensity and gives it shape. A chorus. A stoplight. A turn signal. An inhale. A bridge. An exhale. I can feel wrecked and still keep driving. I can cry and still arrive somewhere. I can sing badly and let that count as aliveness.

And maybe that is what I have been trying to say all along. Not that I love driving in every form. Not that I suddenly become a relaxed little road angel the second I get behind the wheel. Absolutely not. But when the conditions are right, the car becomes one of the only places where my feelings can move through me without turning into a courtroom.

Maybe this is what happiness looks like for me right now

I keep coming back to the question my therapist asked. What makes me happy?

Not what impresses people. Not what sounds healthy in a magazine. Not what I think should make me happy. What actually does.

And the answer, at least right now, is this: happiness sometimes looks like driving around with music turned all the way up until I can feel my own life again.

That may not sound glamorous, but I do not think happiness has to be glamorous to be real. Sometimes it is just the moment your body softens. The moment a lyric says the thing you could not say. The moment you stop feeling trapped inside your own head. The moment the tight chest loosens enough for one full breath. The moment the tears come because the song reached you before shame did.

Sometimes it is also the emotional whiplash of going from The Cure to Lola Young to Whitney Houston to Bad Bunny to Sleep Token and realizing, with a raised eyebrow, that your inner life is apparently a very dramatic little mixtape. Fair enough.

What I am learning is that joy does not have to arrive clean. It can show up tangled with grief, memory, longing, and release. It can show up in a chorus that makes me sing louder than I thought I could. It can show up in a beat that loosens my shoulders. It can show up in a song that does not solve me, but finds me.

There is something deeply human about that. Maybe even holy.

I do not think this playlist proves I am healed. It does not. But it does prove I am still reachable. That joy can still find me. That I am not as numb as I fear. That there are parts of me still leaning toward beauty, still responding to rhythm, still wanting connection, still trying to come back.

So maybe the better question is not why I do not think I am worthy of happiness.

Maybe the better question is why I have been talking about happiness like it only counts when it arrives in a form considered proper by others.

Because this counts.

This playlist counts. The loud car rides count. The crying, the singing, the uneasy songs count. The flirty songs count. The dance songs count. The overwhelmed songs count. The songs that feel like peeling your own skin off emotionally and then fixing your mascara at a stoplight count, too.

And maybe that is where I start. Not with a big declaration. Just with the truth.

I am happiest when I am driving and listening to music very loudly.

For now, that is more than enough truth to hold in my hands.

Why I am writing this down at all

There is power in naming the thing that helps.

Pain has a way of shrinking the world. It can make you feel like you are nothing but your worst reaction, your ugliest memory, your tightest muscle, your next flinch. Writing this down reminds me that I am also made of taste. Rhythm. Voice. Want. Memory. Tears. Volume. A really good bridge and a willingness to hit repeat until my nervous system stops acting like a smoke alarm.

That is a person.

That is not nothing.

And maybe, just maybe, that person is more worthy of happiness than she has been willing to admit.

The post My Driving Playlist and the Kind of Happiness I Can Feel first appeared on Scrink.com.

Tyler Ward is a Colorado-born singer-songwriter, producer, and independent music entrepreneur now based in Nashville. Public bios place his roots in Aurora, Colorado, with later ties to Parker, and official materials describe him today as a producer, songwriter, artist developer, and entrepreneur. That arc matters. He is not just a vocalist who happened to do well online. He is one of those early internet-era musicians who figured out that the song was only part of the story. The connection was the other half.

A career built from the ground up

There is something very Colorado about the Tyler Ward story. Not in a cowboy-hat caricature way. More in the self-starter, build-it-yourself, take-the-long-road kind of way. Colorado Music Experience notes that after high school in Parker, Ward attended the Air Force Academy and later pursued journalism at the University of Northern Colorado before writing, recording, and posting music online. That path explains a lot about his work. You can hear ambition in it, yes, but also process. His songs and covers often feel worked through, not tossed off. Like somebody sat with the idea until the emotional splinters made sense.

He emerged in that fascinating window when YouTube still felt scrappy and direct, when posting a cover online still carried the charge of a homemade introduction instead of a content strategy. Public sources place his active years beginning around 2007, and Billboard recognized him during its Uncharted era as one of the breakout artists rising through digital platforms rather than traditional industry lanes. That makes him part of a very specific pop culture lineage, the bridge between MySpace-era hustle and TikTok-era omnipresence. He was early enough to help invent the path, which honestly deserves more respect than it gets.

More than “the cover guy”

The cleanest label for Ward’s sound is acoustic pop-rock with singer-songwriter bones and a little country-pop shading. Public references describe his music in that neighborhood, and his catalog backs it up. Yes, he is deeply associated with stripped-down covers, but that is only part of the story. His discography moves through originals, collaborations, and Nashville-centered songwriting projects, including Honestly (2013), Reputation (2017), Covers & Co-writes (2018), he said. she said. (2019), Songs From Nashville (2020), and Cover To Cover (2025). That is not the catalog of someone dabbling. That is a working artist who kept building, kept refining, and kept honoring the sound people first came for.

What Ward does especially well is emotional reframing. His signature move is not simply slowing a song down. Lots of people can do that. His trick is making a big pop hit feel less like spectacle and more like subtext. A singalong becomes a conversation. A heartbreak anthem becomes the moment after the text is sent and before the dots appear. That is why his covers land. They do not try to overpower the original. They sidestep it and offer a different way in. Nobody needs a discount Whitney. What listeners respond to is a new emotional angle.

The craft underneath the softness

Ward is primarily known for vocals and guitar, especially in live and video settings, but public bios also credit him with piano, bass, and drums. That fuller instrumental range tracks with the fact that he is also a producer. He is not just standing in front of a mic with good cheekbones and a nice reverb preset. He understands song construction from the inside, which helps explain why even simple acoustic arrangements tend to feel structurally solid instead of flimsy. There is a difference between stripped-down and undercooked. Tyler Ward has always understood that difference.

And if Spotify is your entry point, his profile makes his lane pretty clear. Among his prominent tracks are acoustic or stripped-down takes on “Shallow,” “Africa,” “The Scientist,” and yes, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Acoustic).” That list alone tells a story. He gravitates toward songs with huge melodic identities, then remaps them into something softer and more interior. He does not flatten them. He translates them.

The originals matter too

This is where I want to raise one bold little eyebrow on his behalf. Artists who get known for covers are often treated like they are renting space in music instead of owning property there. That is nonsense. Ward released Honestly through Sony Music Germany in 2013, and his later catalog shows a steady commitment to original music and collaborative writing. His official materials frame him not only as an artist but as a producer and artist developer, which suggests a career built around songcraft, not just performance. The covers may open the door, but the originals are where the furniture lives.

That distinction matters because his career has never really been about imitation. It has been about interpretation, and then expansion. First the cover draws you in. Then the original work shows you what he sounds like when there is no famous ghost in the room. That is where a lot of artists lose people. Ward does not. He keeps the emotional accessibility that made the covers resonate in the first place.

Tyler Ward now

Official sources show Ward currently based in Nashville and deeply involved in Song House, which he describes as one of his favorite endeavors. His site says Song House grew out of a desire to give songwriters and musicians a chance to be heard, later gaining traction through its “30 min to write a hook” concept and building a large social following. His other official materials present him as someone who has built multiple music businesses around modern artist development. That matters because his current identity is bigger than performer alone. He looks increasingly like a builder of ecosystems, the kind of artist who not only makes songs but helps shape the conditions in which other artists can survive.

Why Tyler Ward matters in pop culture

Tyler Ward’s career makes more sense once you stop measuring artists only by the old industry ruler. He is not a cautionary tale about internet fame. He is one of the proof-of-concept stories. Independent. Adaptive. Musically literate. Platform-savvy before that was a job description. He used covers not as karaoke, but as relationship-building, then parlayed that into albums, touring, production work, and artist development. In a culture that loves to sneer at sincerity right up until it needs comfort, that feels almost subversive.

Maybe that is the sweetest part of this whole thing. I went looking for one beloved cover, got mildly betrayed by Spotify, and ended up finding an artist worth sitting with a little longer. That is how pop culture love stories happen for me. Not always through the biggest star, but through the side door. Through the version that catches me off guard. Through the singer who knows how to turn a giant song into a smaller room, and somehow make it feel more human there.

Tyler Ward has built a career in that room. Honestly, that is a world worth writing about.

The post Tyler Ward and the Art of Making Covers Feel Personal first appeared on Scrink.com.

I have lived inside that belief for a long time. Long enough that it stopped feeling like a belief and started feeling like truth.

The rule that made sense, until it didn’t

Here is the thing. “You’re only as happy as your saddest child” can be true in moments. It is not meant to be a lifelong operating system.

For a lot of us, it becomes one anyway.

It helps justify hard choices. It gives meaning to sacrifice. It makes it easier to swallow the moments where we disappear a little, because at least it is for something that matters.

But rules like that do not stay contained. They spread.

They move from “I will show up for my kids” into “I will disappear for everyone.”

And that shift is quiet. It does not announce itself. It just becomes how we live.

The version of me that functions, and the version that folds

There is a version of me that knows how to set boundaries.

She shows up at work. She protects her team. She names what is sustainable and what is not. She does not let people take advantage just because they can.

She is clear. She is fair. She is respected.

And then there is the version of me with people I love.

That version is careful. That version avoids rocking the boat. That version adjusts early and often so no one feels hurt, even if it means I end up carrying the weight.

That is not unusual. That is human.

Of course it is easier to disappoint strangers than people I care about. What took me longer to see was how often I solved that problem by absorbing the discomfort myself.

It works. Until it doesn’t.

Trying not to erase myself

Two things can be true.

I care deeply about the people in my life.

And I have been carrying responsibility for their emotional reactions in a way that erases me.

Saying “I need space” is not a betrayal. It is a boundary.

But if someone is used to me not having needs, then even a simple boundary can feel like a rupture.

That does not automatically mean I did something wrong.

Sometimes it means I am doing something new.

When old patterns meet trauma

I have a history of trauma. That is not new information in my life. What is new is seeing how it still shapes my reflexes.

When keeping the peace has been tied to safety, it makes sense that I default to it. When connection has felt fragile, it makes sense that I protect it, even at my own expense.

But changing those patterns does not feel calm or empowering in the moment. It feels destabilizing.

When I start speaking up, even in small ways, my system does not celebrate. It gets louder. More alert. More reactive.

The question underneath all of it

My kids are getting older.

That is the part I do not always say out loud, but it is there. If so much of my life has been built around making sure they are okay, what happens when they no longer need me in the same way?

Who am I when I am not organizing my life around everyone else’s needs?

That question is not hypothetical. It is getting closer.

Friendship, love, and not disappearing

Friendship matters to me, and so do boundaries.

The same should be true in families.

The goal is not to stop caring. It is to stop proving that care by disappearing.

What would change if my needs showed up earlier?

Not at the breaking point. Not at 9 pm when everything is already too much.

Just a little sooner.

• Saying I need this day to myself, and meaning it
• Keeping small pieces of autonomy, like access to my own time and movement
• Letting someone be disappointed, because I am on the verge of a breakdown

That is not selfish. That is honest.

An invitation

I am not writing this because I have it figured out.

I am writing this because I am in it.

If your happiness has been tied to your kids, I understand why. I really do.

But I am starting to wonder what it would look like to tie it, even a little, back to myself, too.

Not instead of them. Alongside them.

That might be where something new begins.

“You’re only as happy as your saddest child” often comes from:

• love
• responsibility
• maybe even your own childhood patterns

But it turns into:

“I must suffer if my child suffers.”

And that’s not love. That’s codependency.

Healthy parenting looks more like:

“I can sit with your sadness without losing myself in it.”

My kids’ feelings matter. And so do mine.

Both can exist.

The post When Your Happiness Feels Tied to Your Kids first appeared on Scrink.com.

Spotify Aura Ring dropped me into one of those delightfully specific music moments that feels a little silly until it absolutely nails you. And as you know, I am incredibly music motivated. So when the Spotify app landing page suggested I create a playlist for my aura, I jumped right on that.

Using Spotify’s prompt-based playlist feature, I ended up with a green aura playlist built from my listening history, which Spotify framed around healing, balance, and compassion. That read on me was annoyingly accurate in the way only an algorithm with receipts can be. Spotify’s current prompt-to-playlist tools are part of its beta AI and prompted playlist experience for listeners, not some giant mystical rebrand of the app, but this aura concept is exactly the kind of gimmick-meets-self-portrait idea the platform tends to do well.

The green aura verdict actually made sense

Spotify’s own aura language for green is calming, nurturing, emotionally intelligent. My playlist description said my top plays leaned patient, heart-forward, and healing, with Noah Kahan’s “Porch Light” and Lizzy McAlpine’s “ceilings” anchoring a calm, balanced set that still feels alive. You know what? Fair.

There is a very particular kind of self-recognition that happens when a platform describes your taste a little too cleanly. Not in a spooky way. More in a “well, yes, I do keep returning to songs that feel like a hand on the shoulder instead of a fireworks show” kind of way. Green was not flashy. Green was not chaotic. Green was emotionally literate, a little tender, and committed to processing feelings without turning them into performance art. Haha, I feel called out by how accurate this is.

What worked best about the playlist

According to Spotify’s support and product notes, these playlist tools are designed to respond to prompts about moods, scenarios, colors, and aesthetics, then personalize the results around your taste. That lines up with the prompt Spotify used here, which specifically told the system to build around aura, mood, and feeling.

The new-to-me songs gave the feature real value

That is where I was most charmed. Some of the tracks were repeats I have already loved within an inch of their lives, but some were genuinely new to me, and those are the songs that made the feature feel worth opening in the first place.

When a personalized playlist works, it gives you that tiny exhale moment. Earbuds in. Dishes in the sink. Shoulders finally unclenching because a song you would not have picked for yourself lands at exactly the right emotional temperature. That is what this playlist did at its best. It pulled together soft confessionals, restrained ache, and steady-hearted love songs without making the whole thing feel mushy. “Bags” by Clairo, “Sienna” by The Marías, and “I Thought I Saw Your Face Today” by She & Him all fit that gentle-green lane. So did “White Keys” by Dominic Fike, which your playlist notes described as healthy processing disguised as a catchy song. Honestly, that line alone deserved a slow clap.

The repeats were the downside

The less magical part was the déjà vu. A lot of us use Spotify for discovery and comfort in roughly equal measure. The problem is that a listening-history-based playlist is always going to lean toward the songs you have already fed into the machine. So yes, seeing familiar favorites like“I Love You, I’m Sorry,” “BIRDS OF A FEATHER,” “I Wanna Be Yours,” and “the perfect pair” made emotional sense. It also made the playlist feel a little like my own brain had organized a reunion tour.

That is the trade-off. Spotify knows my habits, but it really knows my habits.

This is a cool feature, but it may be a one-and-done for now

That is the piece that kept me from fully falling in love. Spotify’s prompt-based playlist tools can refresh over time, and the company says Prompted Playlist can stay fresh based on your listening patterns. But when your aura result is rooted in the listening history you have already built, it is hard not to feel like the color is somewhat locked in unless your habits genuinely change.

To get a new aura color, I would probably need a whole new soundtrack to my life

And not in a cute, one-week hyperfixation way. I mean a real shift. Different moods. Different loops. Different artists on repeat while I am driving, walking, dissociating in the cereal aisle, or pretending I am not listening to the same heartbreak song for the ninth time. The aura result feels less like a mood ring and more like an annual performance review from my streaming habits.

That is not necessarily a flaw. In fact, it may be the point. The feature works best as a snapshot. It catches the emotional climate of your listening life right now and turns it into a playlist with a neat little thesis statement. But because of that, I do not know how often I would use it back-to-back. Once you have your green, your blue, your pink, whatever it is, there is a good chance the next pull will feel more like a rerun than a revelation.

Still, I liked it, and I would absolutely check back in next year

This is where I land: Spotify Aura Ring is fun. It is thoughtful enough to feel personal and gimmicky enough to stay light on its feet. It gave me a green playlist that mostly understood my emotional lane, introduced me to a few songs I genuinely appreciated, and mirrored back my own listening patterns with just enough accuracy to make me laugh and slightly squint at the screen.

That feels like a win.

The post Spotify Aura Ring Gave Me a Green Playlist first appeared on Scrink.com.

But once I got past that brief spiral, I realized I do not actually believe any of that. I am proud of who I am. I am hopeful about what is still ahead of me. I think there is still plenty of time for more progress, more change, more joy, and more chances to make a difference. In 20 years, half my joints will probably be bionic, and I fully intend to live well into my 100s, so there is still plenty of time to run amok.

The truth is, I like who I am. For a long time, I thought I was supposed to be working toward some perfect, polished version of myself, the one who could hold everything together all the time and do it well. I am not interested in chasing that anymore. I am focusing on being my favorite self, the version of me I know is thriving. That version is still growing, still learning, still a little snarky, and a lot more honest about what actually matters.

What the Last Three Years Have Taught Me About Health

Over the past three years, I have tried hard to practice better self-care. Not the polished, expensive kind that gets sold to women like a personality upgrade, but the real kind. The kind that helps you function, breathe, and keep going.

This Was Never Just About a Photo

Three years ago, in March, I was out with a couple of friends for my birthday. When I look back at those photos now, I can see that I looked happy. I was happy. But what stayed with me was not just what I saw. It was how I felt in my body.

No doctor has ever told me I was overweight, but my weight has been something I have worried about since at least middle school. And for me, this is not just about appearance. My knees have been through a lot. I had my first of many knee surgeries at 16, and that changes how you experience your body. Weight affects how I move, how much pain I carry, and whether I can physically support myself without adding more strain.

And then there is the reality that women’s bodies are constantly shifting. Hormones, stress, age, all of it plays a role. It can feel like trying to manage something that refuses to stay consistent. Packaged chaos is probably the most honest way to describe it.

Finding a Way to Keep Boxing

I got into boxing during my divorce, and it helped me in a way that is hard to explain unless you have ever needed somewhere safe to put your stress. Eventually, the gym became too expensive, so I stopped.

But I missed it, because it made me feel better in my body and honestly boxing feels pretty badass.

Swimming will always be my first love, but it is not accessible to me right now. I do not have the budget for a gym with a pool, and my backyard is 18 by 18, so that option is out.

So I worked with what I had.

If you have been following me, you know I found my way back through Supernatural VR. Once I had that, I set a goal to make time each week to move my body for at least 30 minutes.

Learning What Actually Works

At first, I went hard. Seven days a week, usually over an hour at a time. I kept that up for about a year, and it was not sustainable. My body made that very clear.

So I adjusted. Four to five days a week. Something I could actually maintain.

And I have stuck with it.

I am now on a 158-week streak of meeting my fitness goal. For someone with bad knees, and someone who has never really identified as an athlete outside of swimming, that matters.

I am also the healthiest I have ever been physically. Over the past three years, I have lost 60 pounds. That number still fluctuates, because bodies do that. Mine definitely does. But the bigger truth is that I feel stronger, more stable, and more capable in my own body than I ever have before.

This was never about chasing some perfect version of myself. It was about feeling better, reducing strain on my joints, and being able to support myself in a way that actually works for my life.

The Other Ways I Have Been Showing Up for Myself

Taking care of myself has not just been about physical health. It has been a collection of choices that support me in different ways.

I have stayed consistent with therapy for over a year now, and it has been incredibly helpful in a steady, grounding way.

I have also continued getting tattoos. I have written about this before, but it matters. I have experienced a lot of trauma in my life, and tattoos are a kind of pain that I control and choose. There is something powerful in that.

I love Malarkey Tattoos, and I love working with Rem. He has hand-drawn 9 of my 11 tattoos. He is patient, incredibly talented, and he supports my writing, which means a lot to me. I genuinely look forward to every session.

Writing is another piece of this. I wrote and published three books between 2025 and 2026, which is something I am extremely proud of. I have always loved writing, but the Fern Glade Series opened something up in me and helped me process a lot of emotion in a way that felt real.

And in a completely different category, I discovered Good Mythical Morning this year thanks to Braeden and Grace, and I am fully invested. Rhett and Link have become part of my daily routine, and honestly, that kind of joy counts, too.

The Work I Am Proudest Of Is Being a Mom

As much as I have learned about discipline, health, and consistency, my best job, my most rewarding job, and my most difficult job has been being a mom.

I want to be a woman my children can lean on, and also fly away from, knowing they will always have a home with me and I will always have their back. That balance is not easy, especially as a single mom, and it is something I am constantly learning in real time.

Watching Them Grow and Letting Them Go

Brae and his girlfriend, Grace, will likely be moving soon because of career goals and changes. I am not looking forward to that transition, but I know we will all get through it. It is just a new chapter in a lifelong adventure.

Finn is starting his first job today, and I am so proud of him. He will be in school for half the day and working the other half as part of Hodgson’s co-op plan. Watching him step into that responsibility is one of those moments that makes you realize how fast everything moves.

Amelia just had her district honors band concert and is preparing for jazz band and the school’s spring concert. She is so creative and talented. Thirteen has been the hardest year I have had with her, but I think it has also been one of the hardest years for her, too. I understand how overwhelming it is to try to figure out who you are while managing everything else, because I am still doing that myself.

Who I Am Outside of Being a Mom

Because I have been a single mom for so long, there are times when I do not fully know who I am outside of that role. That is not something I feel panicked about, but it is something I am starting to pay attention to.

Maybe that is part of what 45 is asking of me. Not to have all the answers, but to stay curious about the question.

The Reality of Work and Holding It All Together

Part of that answer probably includes the fact that I am still working multiple jobs, because proper compensation in higher education is apparently a fairy tale people tell each other to stay hopeful. So I keep making ends meet with freelance gigs, because bills do not care about institutional dysfunction.

That reality is tiring. Sometimes I can hardly keep my eyes open because I am doing all of the things all of the time for all of the people.

And still, I know I have a good life.

This Is What 45 Feels Like

All in all, I am really freaking blessed.

Even on the overwhelming days, even when I am exhausted, I know I have built something meaningful. I have a strong support system. I have people who show up for me, and that matters.

So yes, turning 45 was a little rough at first.

But what I feel now is steadier.

I like my life. I like who I am. I am proud of what I have built, proud of how far I have come, and proud of the people my kids are becoming.

And honestly, I am pretty stoked for the next 45 plus years, because I know I will keep adapting, growing, and finding my way forward.

The post Turning 45 and Finding My Favorite Self first appeared on Scrink.com.

There is no question that social media can harm young people. Courts are taking those harms more seriously, and in March 2026, juries in California and New Mexico found Meta, and in one case Google, liable in cases involving harm to young users. Those decisions matter, and they should push technology companies to answer for platform design choices that can worsen depression, anxiety, compulsive use, and exposure to abuse.

However, blaming Meta alone for the mental health crisis among young people is still an oversimplification.

Social media may amplify existing problems, but it did not create them on its own. Treating one company as the sole villain ignores the larger breakdown in support, guidance, stability, and care that too many children and teenagers experience every day.

Social Media Can Intensify Harm, but It Is Not the Whole Story

Public debate often jumps too quickly from the claim that social media can be harmful to the claim that social media is the cause of the crisis. That leap is not supported by the broader evidence.

The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on youth mental health and social media explains that the effects of social media depend on many factors, including how much time young people spend online, what content they encounter, what kinds of interactions platforms encourage, and whether that use interferes with sleep, exercise, and other parts of healthy development. The advisory also notes that children and adolescents are affected differently depending on their individual vulnerabilities and their social and economic conditions.

That means social media is part of the problem, but it is not the whole problem.

A child who already feels isolated, unsupported, overwhelmed, or unseen is more likely to be harmed by a digital environment that rewards comparison, conflict, and endless engagement. A platform can intensify that pain, but it often enters the picture after other failures are already in place.

Too Many Young People Are Growing Up Without Enough Support

This is the larger issue.

Too many children and teenagers are growing up in systems that are stretched thin or failing them entirely. Some live in households where parents are overworked and exhausted. Some attend underfunded schools that cannot meet their emotional or mental health needs. Some have little or no access to counseling or treatment. Some are surrounded by adults who model blame instead of accountability. None of that begins with an app.

Federal data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that only 58.5% of U.S. teens said they always or usually received the social and emotional support they needed. The disparities were even worse for girls, Black and Hispanic teens, and LGBTQ+ teens. That is a warning sign that the support system around many young people is already weak before social media ever enters the equation.

Schools are under strain as well. In 2024, the Institute of Education Sciences reported that only 48% of public schools said they could effectively provide mental health services to all students in need. The most common barriers were insufficient staffing, inadequate funding, and limited access to licensed mental health professionals.

The staffing shortage is especially telling. The American School Counselor Association recommends a student-to-counselor ratio of 250 to 1, but the national average for the 2024–2025 school year was 372 to 1. When schools do not have enough trained adults to support students, it is misleading to act as though one company alone created the crisis.

Accountability Should Not Stop With Meta

Another problem with the current debate is that it is too narrow.

If the argument is that platform design, open communication systems, weak moderation, and engagement-driven products can harm children, then the scrutiny should not stop at Meta. It should also extend to TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Roblox, and any other digital environment where minors can be exposed to harassment, manipulation, sexual exploitation, harmful comparison, or compulsive use.

Reuters reported on March 26, 2026, that thousands of lawsuits are pending against major technology companies over youth-harm claims and that more than 130 lawsuits are pending in federal court against Roblox over child-safety allegations. The broader legal theory now being tested is not just about one app. It is about a much wider digital ecosystem.

That does not mean every platform causes the same kind of harm in the same way. It means the public should be honest and consistent. If people are going to condemn harmful digital design, they should apply that standard across the board.

AI Is the Next Unfinished Crisis

Now add AI to the mix. Kids are using chatbots, AI companion apps, and image tools faster than adults or lawmakers are willing to deal with them. The problem is not that there are literally no rules. The problem is that the protections are patchy, late, and nowhere near adequate for how quickly these tools are moving into young people’s lives. Pew found in February 2026 that more than half of teens had already used chatbots, and 12% said they had used them for emotional support or advice. That should set off alarms. We are handing children systems that can flatter, influence, mislead, sexualize, and simulate care, and we are doing it without anything close to a mature public framework for safety. Social media was never the end of this conversation. AI is making the same failures bigger, faster, and harder to ignore.

Lawsuits May Punish Companies, but They Do Not Rebuild Support Systems

There is a place for legal action when companies knowingly design products in ways that put children at risk. Accountability matters. Safer products matter. Transparency matters. Better moderation, stronger protections for minors, and more responsible design all matter.

However, lawsuits are still a limited response to a much larger crisis.

They can punish companies. They can generate headlines. They can pressure platforms to change some features. What they cannot do is create emotionally healthy environments for children on their own.

A lawsuit cannot make parents less overworked. It cannot fully fund schools. It cannot lower counselor caseloads. It cannot guarantee that a teenager has a trusted adult to talk to. It cannot replace community stability, healthy boundaries, or the daily presence that children need in order to build resilience.

That is why blaming platforms alone becomes a cop-out. It allows society to act as though removing or punishing one bad actor is the same thing as solving the underlying problem. It is not.

What Young People Actually Need

If society is serious about helping young people, the response has to be bigger than blaming technology companies.

Young people need safer online spaces, but they also need stronger families, better-funded schools, more accessible mental health care, healthier boundaries around device use, and policies that invest in children instead of abandoning them and then reacting when the damage becomes visible.

The CDC states that school connectedness has long-lasting effects on health and well-being and that young people who feel connected at school are less likely to face a range of health risks. The CDC also states that strong bonds with families and other caring adults can protect adolescent mental health. That is the kind of support structure that actually changes outcomes.

Children do not just need less screen exposure. They need more support, more stability, more boundaries, and more adults willing to take responsibility.

Children Deserve Better Than a One-Villain Explanation

Blaming Meta for the mental health crisis among young people may be politically convenient, but it is not enough. Social media can amplify harm, sometimes severely. Technology companies should be held accountable when they build products that exploit vulnerability or ignore foreseeable risks.

However, one company did not create a generation-wide crisis on its own.

The deeper failure is social, institutional, and cultural. It is about what happens when schools are under-resourced, mental health care is out of reach, parents are stretched to the limit, and too many young people are left without the steady support they need.

Children deserve better, and that means expecting more from all of us.

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