what’s a Valentine’s Day tradition from your younger days? 💖
starring Chuckry from Only Child
Not a Writers Club is a bi-weekly newsletter. Here you’ll find musings written by me (Celeste) along with writing prompts that you can try out yourself. If you’ve been looking for a sign to keep writing, this is it.
Today’s newsletter is a guest post written by Chuckry Vengadam who has a newsletter called Only Child.
Hi everyone! Hope y’all are gearing up for a safe Valentine’s Day with someone you love (which still most certainly counts if it’s yourself, all the single folks). As you might’ve heard, I am not Celeste. I’m Chuckry, and I’m writing a guest post for her this week, which I’m excited for! And she did the same for my newsletter, Only Child, which I urge you to check out here.
In an inadvertent build-up towards Valentine’s Day, I rewatched the movie Eighth Grade with my roommate earlier this week. For the uninitiated, the movie features Kayla, a shy girl who doles out life advice on her unwatched YouTube channel, as she pushes through the final week of middle school. It shows the humiliation parade of American adolescence–navigating popularity dynamics, impressing your crush, hating your parents, and compromising yourself to look cool, all while her social media addiction blurs her private and public personalities together–in a way that feels like a nature documentary. The soundtrack, the camera work, and all the other elements of movie magic that I feel too ill-equipped to enumerate, paint a hilariously vicious picture of what being in middle school’s like, where adolescence is something to conquer before it eats you alive.
Look at these animals. These absolute demons. Beasts with braces spraying water out between their teeth, chugging Gatorade and eating Doritos in the pool. Completely unhinged behavior. Nary a parent to be seen. Just children doing weird primal shit in a pool. If my future kid ever folds their eyelids inward at me like that I will immediately seek help for them.
No wonder Kayla’s so nervous. I’ve never been exactly in her shoes, but I understand that horrified feeling of having to Enter A Situation for which I’m woefully unprepared. One particularly strange high school Valentine’s Day tradition comes to mind. We were each to write our names on hearts cut out of red, pink, or white construction paper and wear them around our necks throughout the day. However, you weren’t supposed to speak to someone of the opposite sex, because if you did, they got to take your heart and wear it around their own neck like a hunting trophy. At the end of the day, the person from each grade with the most hearts won a prize of some sort, like candy or something.
Instantly, everyone avoided talking to people of the opposite sex. The ecosystem changed. Everyone was on edge. Hushed whispers and sideways glances. Guy friends covering each other’s mouths before they made a mistake and talked to a girl. Heart collection strategies were always the same. Some future fuckboy with hair gelled up in the front would ask the girl sitting in front of him to pick up his pencil, and she’d say yes and lose her heart. Other times, there’d be emotional manipulation. A kid might leap in front of another during passing time and scream, “AAAHHHH I’M GONNA FAIL I NEED TO COPY YOUR HOMEWORK AAAHHHH” And the poor soul whose blood pressure just skyrocketed would say “huh oh my god okay” and then lose their heart.
In tenth grade, I stole Miranda Mio’s heart. Arguably the hottest girl in school. Unlike Kayla, though, I didn’t have a cinematic moment where I conquered my fears and jumped into the metaphorical pool. No, Miranda just turned around in her chair and frantically asked me what last night’s French homework was–she’d forgotten to do it. I told her, barely suppressing a grin, it was workbook pages something-and-something, and that she had to give me her heart. Her face dropped. She was shattered. She had to give away her heart (whose value she definitely knew) to this clown obsessed with Aeropostale. She tried to bargain, but I didn’t relent. I got her heart and made sure it was on display.
I’m not sure what the purpose of this exercise was beyond keeping kids entertained through mindless competition, just like school dances, homecoming king and queen, or football games, but it certainly feels insidious in hindsight: trading the primary symbol of human emotion for clout, training for sexual abstinence (which my school district also taught) by not speaking to the opposite sex, etc. But also, goddamn, those Valentine’s Days were such a thrill. After all, here I am, remembering them ten years later, piecing together what it all meant.
So. With all that said, here’s your writing prompt: What’s a Valentine’s Day tradition from your younger days that you now realize is strange? Or funny, or awkward, or anything? What made it that way?
Required Reading 📚
Everyone Else Is In Love, and I’m Just Listening To Taylor Swift, which explained to me, someone who didn’t listen to Taylor Swift much growing up, why she’s so meaningful and important to so many people.
The harrowing personal essay “Bar Rot” by Felicia Urso about how bodies betray us, and about family.
Of course, you oughta watch Eighth Grade if you haven’t yet. Hits you in lots of different feelings that you don’t expect, which isn’t super far from the middle school experience.
Quick Tip 📝
Write your first draft as though no one else will ever read your writing. Oftentimes, imagining an audience’s response to what I write gives me stage fright, and I stop. Pretend whatever you’re writing is a journal entry or a conversation you’re having in your head so you can just be yourself. You can always edit it down in later drafts.
You can find Chuckry on the Internet @churrthing