Before I begin reminiscing on the most painfully awkward years of our short existences, I’d like to establish a playlist for this column. So, if you would, queue up “Move Along” by the All American Rejects, “Yeah” by Usher and company, and “Toxic” by Britney Spears. I feel this is an accurate sample of the middle school dance anthems that consecrated the sweaty rec centers and gyms of our youths.

I love middle school. Present tense. To say that I loved middle school would be a gross inaccuracy. I, like many others, boasted a mouth full of braces as my greatest accessory, struggled to preserve my individuality while shopping at the same meccas of mass-produced styles from whence every other girl my age amassed her wardrobe, and pretended not to like High School Musical even though I went to the concert with my mom. I kept a blog in the hopes of being discovered as the voice of my generation (evidence of the inflated sense of importance and drama with which I regarded my daily experiences) and meticulously detailed everything that affected my world in a diary. It survives to tell a story of a girl who thought her best friend Jordyn was too young to have a boyfriend, suffered existential grief because she wasn’t famous yet, and wanted to slow dance with a boy but had convinced herself that he hadn’t asked because he didn’t yet realize what a “unique beauty” (a generous descriptor for a girl who one time plucked her eyebrows into oblivion) she was. Looking back, it was probably because I sweated through my favorite American Eagle graphic T-shirt out of sheer anxiety at my first school dance. Oh well.

In middle school, everything is important, especially if it isn’t. Angst is poetic and infinitely misunderstood by anyone over the age of 15. Kids are mean, it’s hard to be different, and vulnerability is ubiquitous but rarely acknowledged. Not only did you have to remember to put on deodorant every day, you had to deal with the embarrassment of being the last pick in gym class, the humiliation of a bad haircut, jerks who masked their own insecurities by scrutinizing others, and a budding and frequently confusing introduction to sexuality- all while wondering if your crush was glancing in your general direction and if s/he thought that white stuff on your shirt was dandruff because it totally wasn’t you swear.

For the same reasons, I assert that these borderline traumatizing times and memories are valuable. We are unified in our retrospective mortification. We can look back and realize that nobody had it easy, even if they were dubbed the top of the eighth grade social hierarchy. Joseph Campbell famously said “all of life is suffering.” Though it may not appear to be, this is comforting because it reminds us of the universality of our awkwardness, our anxiety, our fears of being excluded, and our desires to be special. It begs us to be a little kinder, if not for Campbell’s sake, than for our middle school selves. Additionally, the things that made us weird in middle school make us infinitely cooler now, and we’re brave, talented, and more interesting for sticking with them.

Perhaps our memories should be gentler toward that weird twilight zone of fifth to eighth grade.

Next week, I illustrate similarities between middle school rec center dances and the Ticker by arguing that the former is a not so distant ancestor of the latter (plus booze, minus the chaperones). Stay tuned.

Olivia White