On the Past Self
How the 2016 Trend Helped Me Face My Fear of Looking at My Own Past
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Looking backwards has always been difficult for me.
Whether that’s a result of a faulty memory that has kept me in the dark for the majority of my life or a very robust trauma response (i.e. total lack of resilience), I have always struggled with remembering the past.
In addition to my inability to remember what happened, the act of looking back on the past has always been emotionally difficult.
Maybe my memory is more based on emotions than events, which feels really silly when I look back at my intellectual interests in the study of history. If history is a record of events of the past, shouldn’t our personal record of our past be defined by events? I always felt history was written too impersonally. Memory is less about events and shared reality, and that’s difficult to admit to yourself. Memory is an emotional journey, a deeply personal one.
Does everybody deal with this in some way?
Just typing those couple of paragraphs, I can feel the tension starting to grow from my upper shoulders into the base of my skull and all the way up into my jaw. There are a lot of emotions to look back on.
Having this problem makes it especially difficult to be a well adjusted functioning human being. Right? I’m working from hearsay and rumor on what it is to be a properly adjusted real person. Despite the risk of self realization, reflecting on our past is incredibly important. It gives you the ability to see again; gain insight through comparison; make informed plans; decisions based on experience and observation; and with that you can finally make time to celebrate wins, relive happy memories by accepting the gauntlet of emotions leading to it, see, smell, and feel old friends who might no longer be here…you get the idea.
Initially when I came across the 2016 trend in my various social media platforms, I brushed it off as just another dumb trend. More likely it is some nefarious AI plot to track our faces across time and build algorithms to better identify anyone, much like those silly personal information fishing traps where you respond with your rapper name based upon birth year and other identifying info. I don’t remember being so cynical in 2016.
And then something started to pull me towards the past, and I became curious about what my 2016 looked like. It was this curiosity that helped me look back to rediscover.
Did I have to fight through some feelings of fear, anxiety, and nervousness of what I might see? Sure. Did it stop me from looking? No.
Curiosity will always override our lizard brains. Maybe it’s only a reconstruction, but it feels and I live it in no less truthful a fashion. Is the past just the truth of our present?
Turns out 2016 was an especially important and transitionary year in my life.
It was the year I started baking! Blimey! How could I forget? And when I say start, I mean I went from baking my first ever tin of muffins at the beginning of that year and by march I was attempting to bake my first ever sourdough loaf.
This isn’t a conscious memory. It’s an external one, and one I had quite literally had to rediscover by organizing some old photos. I remembered baking 2016, but only as a matter of fact that I had baked. When I came upon those old photos, that’s when I felt something. That is when I began to remember as a matter of experience. The feelings of success and risk and surprise, they felt as new as that first underproofed and overbaked loaf that I celebrated.
Looking back I definitely should have started with baking basic bread before pivoting into sourdough bread baking and 100% rye sourdough baking but hindsight is 20/20 and at that time I was following my cravings over my logic. If I really wanted to, you know, do it all over again and be better at it. I wouldn’t, I wasn’t doing it for those reasons. I could never have felt such joy if I had been doing it for any other reason than why I actually did it. That’s the truth I rediscovered by looking back and feeling.
Baking was helping me deal with some major life and career changes that I was going through that year, but most importantly baking and cooking were processes that helped me rebuild my sense of self.
In 2016, I “decided” (story for another time) to leave my PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin. I didn’t necessarily go far, I got a full-time job on campus as an Undergraduate Advisor for the College of Liberal Arts to help Rhetoric & Writing as well as English majors navigate their degree requirements, professional development, and academic expectations.
Leaving graduate school is incredibly existentially difficult, especially for those of us who derive their entire sense of self from their work (this is definitely the majority of graduate students). Being a scholar/an academic is who I thought I was. Everyone I knew was a scholar, academic or otherwise embroiled in that world. So if I am no longer an academic, who am I? What was my purpose? Where do I go?
And let’s be honest, the nature of academia promotes this identity merger, since it expects graduate students to dedicate their whole self to their intellectual pursuits, by keeping you attached to the campus, department, whatever field you are in as closely as humanely possible.
There isn’t much time to be anything else.
You get to wear a lot of academic hats when you are pursuing a PhD but not many hats outside or at least you start to forget all your other identities due to the demanding nature of academia. You don’t demonstrate your commitment to academia through work-life balance or having communities outside of academia, if anything dedicating time to these external things is often penalized and work against you, labeling you as someone who is less “dedicated” to their scholarship and academic ambitions. Academia is starting to sound like a cult, and in some ways it very much is. It suffers from the weight of ego and hegemony in an uncomfortably similar way, and there are many victims of this kind of institutional violence.
Coming out of this toxic environment requires one to almost completely rebuild their entire sense of self. It is the safest form of recovery and rehabilitation, otherwise that slow poison can hang around to wreak havoc. Trust me, I didn’t completely rebuild myself. Not immediately. I should’ve just cut it off at the hand, when I saw it starting to go bad.
In graduate school there is no alternative, your purpose is your work.
No wonder so many grad students pursue graduate school when they have no idea what they actually want out of life. And yes, I am 100% included in that company. I thought I wanted to be a professor after having watched too many Woody Allen movies. Looking back, it was only ever an anachronism I was sold and one that every mentor, advisor and colleague idealistically, almost childishly, insisted upon. The reality was that a lot of people were treated differently, poorly and contrary to the ideals that brought many of us to these institutions.
I started baking (and cooking a lot more) that semester. If I didn’t know who I was, I went back (all the way back) to my roots, my ethnic identity. I began reconnecting with my Greek-Ukrainian self; learning to cook my mom’s dishes from memory and by asking her questions whenever she was in the mood to talk about it; talking to my father about the dishes he grew up eating; and a lot of independent research, therapy, and reflection.
Additionally, once I started to bake and cook the things from my past, they ended up being a self-soothing mechanism for the existential angst I was constantly feeling. And you know what? All these skills that I’ve built up in the libraries and lecture halls, the pure stubborn endurance of writing a goddamn thesis, all of these scholarly and academic things I was afraid of losing were right here as I baked and cooked.
My most memorable bake of 2016 was my 100% rye sourdough bread, something that I couldn’t find in Austin at that time. Looking back I could have taken a more systemic approach to my first loaf but I did some initial research, picked a 100% rye recipe I found on YouTube, and had zero expectations of it working out. Like pulling a random old book off the library shelf from an unexamined subject I’ve often daydreamed about, a pure act of discovery.
Here’s my little monster:
Cringe! I know. I swear I won’t make a comparison to Frankenstein. Victor was nuts. My creation is at least delicious. And just so we are all clear, this was my first ever loaf of bread I have ever baked.
But looking back I am so proud of myself for diving into the deep end and honestly I didn’t know how deep that end really was which turned out to be exactly what I needed to start this insane journey. I didn’t care back then. I still don’t. I just want to keep diving. Because I think if I knew how complicated this world really is I would have talked myself out of it, or would have been too afraid to even attempt it.
But my appetite was stronger than my fear. I wanted the taste of 100% rye sourdough bread. So I made it happen.
Looking back at the year 2016 felt fulfilling and even a little exciting. Fear wasn’t the dominant feeling.
Did I latch on to baking and cooking at a time when I didn’t know who I was anymore. I guess maybe I did. Did these things lead me to a completely different world and people? Sure did.
It also gave me skills to be self-reliant. The fact that I can go into a kitchen and with a few tries make pretty much anything I want is a really freaking cool thing.
Do I want cooking and baking to be my whole self? HARD NO. I learned that lesson too many times in my life.
We are not defined by any one thing or event. The definitions change. They don’t become different, but they become more. More what? I don’t know. Maybe they’re more clear or more loud or we no longer hear that frequency that worried and frightened us? What you do or who you are is, I think, a deeply personal conversation with yourself. Defining your past by the externalized betrays the depths of your memories, your emotional truths. Humans are complex beings and our sense of self comes from a lot of places, never just one, unfortunately we are not often reminded of this and society is designed to reward people who tend to be one dimensional on the surface. But please remember that we are complex and multifaceted.
Personally for me 2026 is the perfect time to start leaning into my various identities and maybe even add a couple new ones.
Maybe overtime, and practice, looking at the much harder years of my life will become easier as well. Those emotions are a lot, but I’ve seen the trees from the forest before. The title of my post might be a little misleading since I still have quite an immense fear of confronting my entire past, but doing it bit by bit moment by moment feeling by feeling is an approach that is working for me at this time.
What were some of your memorable moments from 2016?
2016 a major memory is that I decided to retire from public education. Half of me wanted to half of me didn't want to. It is the process of human growth and emotional growth and every other way one can grow. Accepting is the key. Accepting the choices we have made and learning from the choices mistakes and all. Quoting one of my favorite verses. "There is a time for everything under heaven. "
The connection between baking and rebuilding identity after academia really resonates. What struck me most was how you dove into 100% rye as your first loaf - that kind of fearless experimentation actually mirrors the best parts of academic curiosity without the institutional toxicity. I had a similiar moment leaving a different kind of structured enviornment and found that cooking gave me control over processes and outcomes in a way that felt both immediate and forgiving.