Simone Reddington

This week, social media has been dominated with nostalgia for the year 2016.  Thanks to the creation of a TikTok filter named after the year, searches for ‘2016’ on the app has soared by 452% over the last few days.  I have really enjoyed seeing people sharing content that portrayed their lifestyles a decade ago, as well as celebrating the music and fashion of the time.  In today’s global era of era of political uncertainty, it makes sense that we all want to go back to a time before Brexit, the pandemic and AI. 

In 2016, I was eighteen years old and in my first year of university at Liverpool. I was living in a huge student accommodation block in the middle of the city centre, and I absolutely adored the freedom of living in a busy centre without any parental supervision.  I had previously been a quiet teenager who had never had much of a social life, so I tried to compensate by cultivating as many friendships as I possibly could and never saying no to a night out.  As I scroll through my iCloud camera roll from ten years ago as a twenty-eight-year-old, I feel an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for my late teenage years.  I took so many photos, that I plastered all over Snapchat and Instagram, of nights out in dingy student nightclubs where I would drink sugary VKs and dance to Drake and Major Lazer until the early hours of the morning.  In these photos I am smiling and accompanied by various other intoxicated teenagers, most of whose names I now struggle to remember.     

However, I am also acutely aware of the reality that I was not as happy as I appeared to be in these photos.  2016 was also the year that I had my first panic attack and I ended the year in a pit of depression that I hid from my friends. Looking back, it’s hardly surprising that I struggled with my mental health as I exhausted myself by people-pleasing. I cringe now when I remember how desperate I was to make an abundance of friends by blindly tagging along to every single night out that I was invited to, purely to maintain contact with acquaintances who had only asked me to be polite.  The people who I met in my first-year student accommodation were all lovely, and I genuinely wish them, but I didn’t have anything in common with most of them.  We now live in a society where there is a much more awareness of how neurodiversity can present itself, and I was definitely guilty of masking aspects of my true identity.  I wish I used my abundance of free time as a student to join societies, pursuing hobbies or even just thinking about what I wanted to do with my degree, rather than just going clubbing.   

It was during my party girl era of 2016 when I started to attract male attention for the first time in my life.  I was certainly never the girl whom everyone fancied, but I did drunkenly kiss a fair few boys in the previously referred dingy nightclubs.  Unfortunately for me, I was very sexually inexperienced before going to university, so I was unable to tell whether these boys genuinely liked me or if they just wanted to pull. Despite publicly proclaiming to be a feminist girlboss, I would still let these young men without a fully developed frontal lobe define my self-confidence. By no means did I look like Gigi Hadid back in 2016, but I certainly wasn’t ugly, and I had a lot going for me than I realised at the time.   I just wasted far too much of my late teenage years chasing male validation and obsessing over fuckboys who couldn’t be any less interested in me.   

Despite what I have described, I do have a lot of fond memories of being a carefree student in 2016.  I don’t regret my party days, as I did have some fun and I have learnt a lot about life from my mistakes.  I certainly wish that the UK was in a less politically divided climate, and that you could still buy a pint for less than four quid. However, if I had the opportunity to go back in time, the first thing I would do would be to tell younger Simone to be kinder to herself.  By that I wouldn’t mean encouraging her to buy any more Topshop skinny jeans or glittery eyeshadow palettes; but to accept her authentic self and stop people-pleasing.  In the meantime, as time travel unfortunately doesn’t exist, let’s try embrace the carefree attitude that we loved in 2016 and use it to romanticise our lives now, in 2026.