What does the ‘I met my younger self for coffee’ trend really tell us? That most of us had disordered eating when we were younger
Why the much-mocked social media meme struck a chord with me
Content warning: today’s newsletter discusses disordered eating and bulimia.
Hi hi,
For anyone lucky enough to not know what I’m on about in the headline, let me fill you in. A trend has emerged on TikTok and Instagram in which women (at least I’ve only seen women participate) post what it might look like if present day them went for a coffee with their younger self (example: “She wore leggings and a hoodie, I wore denim, a white button down and trench coat”) and set to the maudlin track “Sweet Heat Lightning” by Gregory Alan Isakov, who is probably out buying a new car as I type. They are all over my FYP (for you page) and I hope this is not outing myself as someone who seeks out pictures of napkins with inspirational quotes embroidered on them because I swear I’ve never done that.
Based on a poem by Jennae Cecelia, the trend has been embraced by content creators all over the world. Unless you’re the sort of person who owns a bejewelled Stanley Cup, you’ll likely find the resulting videos excruciating. They are cringy and mawkish. Like a lot of other social media formats, it is really just an excuse to show off, in the same spirit as unpackaging designer handbags, daily routines that start at 5am with journaling and matcha lattes, or tradwives making Oreos from scratch. Here the flex is about how far you’ve come in life, your journey, your growth.
But after watching enough of them (I also can’t skip footage of plane crashes), I began to notice a running theme. One of the parts of the video is relaying what the present day you orders and what the younger self orders during this make believe coffee session. In almost every video I’ve seen, the present day person orders something fun and calorific (vanilla bean latte, almond croissant) and the younger self orders something restrictive such as black coffee. Curiously this detailing of what you order is absent from the original poem, but women have introduced it themselves and it’s caught on.
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It was then that I started being a little less hard on the Tiktokers. Because if I had coffee with my younger self (oh god it’s happening) then I would order a full-fat latte with one sugar and a slice of carrot cake but, much like the women in the videos, my younger self would order a black coffee with a dash of skim milk and one sweetener, hold the baked goods.