Everyone Misses 2016
I Wrote These Poems Back Then
Everyone misses 2016.
You can see it everywhere if you know what to look for, or if you're chronically online and up to date on internet trends. The makeup. The clothes. The playlists. Old screenshots, old pics and memes, old Tumblr-era aesthetics keep resurfacing.
2016 has become shorthand for before.
Before things felt so relentlessly heavy. Before the news cycle never shut off. Before so many of us learned how fragile everything really is.
It was also before we were, as I mentioned before, chronically online. There was a limit back then. Instagram was in chronological order. You saw your friends first. The app was, dare I say, more fun, less addictive. You could log off without feeling like you were missing something catastrophic. You could exist without carrying the entire world in your pocket.
2016 was simpler. Not perfect or innocent by any means. But simpler.
And when things become as scary and complicated as they are today, it makes sense to miss, even romanticize, the simple. I don’t think people miss 2016 because it was flawless. I think they miss it because it was, generally, emotionally survivable.
2016 was the year I released Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately.
And now, ten years later, here we are… with the internet longing for 2016 again, and me releasing More Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately.
The 30 poems on Side A of More Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately were all written around the same time as SIBFL, between 2014 and 2016ish. Some didn’t make it into the original book because I couldn’t finish them in time, or because I thought another piece conveyed the idea more effectively. Others I kept for myself—they felt too personal. But now, after all this time, I’m ready to share them.
Ten years change you. Here I am today, almost 40!
But More Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately wasn’t written by someone who survived herself a few times, because, technically, the poems were at least started earlier in the 2010s when I was still very much a hopeful mess. This girl:
This book is for the people who read the first one and kept trying their best. We can remember that version of ourselves with a little tenderness. For the people who didn’t think they would make it ten more years…and somehow did. And, for the people just finding my work today, in 2026.
Thanks for reading,
Alicia