‘Paper Girls’ and Who We Are to Our Younger Selves

The new Amazon Prime series depicts conversations between adults and their 12-year-old selves.

Riley Lai Nelet as Erin Tieng, Camryn Jones as Tiffany Quilkin, Fina Strazza as KJ Brandman, Sofia Rosinsky as Mac Coyle
Anjali Pinto / Prime Video

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In 2015, I was teaching high-school students in New York. I worked at a nonprofit that partnered with local schools, and my class taught concepts such as growth mindset, social capital, perseverance—the kinds of ideas that are generally outside of traditional curriculums. The students looked up to me, especially the boys. I fit the bill of a strong, positive role model: an assertive, educated, young Black man who could relate to them. We had heart-to-heart conversations, and they often shared things with me that they said they didn’t feel comfortable sharing with their other teachers. A popular student, John, once sat with me in a stairwell and told me about his struggles at home and how they were affecting him in school. I cherished my role in those students’ lives. Their admiration made me feel good about myself.

Until one day, when the students and I were working through a lesson about planning their futures. They were to set a goal and draw a roadmap that used benchmarks to connect them from where they were today to where they would be when they became their ideal future selves. The most confident kids charted their path to becoming Major League Baseball players or Grammy-winning musicians. But some students didn’t know what they wanted. Others knew what they wanted but not how to get there. One student, Leon, turned the activity to me in a way that I hadn’t expected.

“Are you where you dreamed you would be when you were my age?” he asked.

I was stunned. I hadn’t thought about teenage me in a long time. Am I where I dreamed I would be when I was his age?

Of course I wasn’t. Not even close.

That’s a dick question, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t tell if he was trying to poke fun at me or was earnestly asking. The fact that I was even questioning his sincerity made me even more upset. Leon was basically a mirror image of teen me, and he reminded me that—outside of the pride I felt as a role model to these kids—I hated my job. I worked at a shitty nonprofit that fundraised millions of dollars from Wall Street donors who pretended to care about helping poor Black kids as much as the organization pretended that our program was worth the money. Leon’s question felt like a rude thing to ask an adult, like how much money or sex I had. Am I where I dreamed I would be when I was his age? Fuck you, kid. Here I am being a positive role model, and you bring up my hopes and dreams.

I must have stared at Leon for 10 seconds before I finally started dancing around his question like a politician with statements about how life is complicated. I technically didn’t even know what a nonprofit was when I was your age. I’m sure I wanted to help people … or, like … I wanted to do good, and, like … I can still be creative with lesson plans … in a way … so, yeah.

I was trying to convince myself as much as I was trying to convince Leon.

In reality, when I was around his age, I was changing into someone who wanted to prove myself to others. In college, my self-worth was based on accomplishments, leading me to chase ridiculous goals specifically because they were difficult. Eventually, I split myself in two without realizing it: There was the real me, who wanted to either be a pro basketball player or write animated TV shows for a living, and “ambitious Jordan,” who wanted to graduate with three majors, join the Peace Corps, go to grad school, and become a U.S. diplomat. It took years before I recognized that “ambitious Jordan” was me living for other people. I then began to reclaim the person I really wanted to be—and that person did not want to be using his $100,000 NYU degree at a bad nonprofit that paid me $41,000 a year.

I thought about that day when I watched Paper Girls, a new show on Amazon Prime Video that premiered last week. It’s a sci-fi drama set in 1988 and for that reason has drawn comparisons to Stranger Things (another show that many of us love for its nostalgia, in spite of its poor writing). But Paper Girls actually spends more time in the 21st century than the ’80s. In the first episode, a diverse group of newspaper-delivery girls find themselves in the middle of two armies fighting a time-travel war and are transported into the future; they spend the rest of the series trying to get back to 1988. Along the way, they see their future selves and are angry, shocked, or jazzed about the person they’re meant to become.

In many ways, Paper Girls is a tepid adaptation of a comic-book series by Brian K. Vaughan—the writer of Saga, the series I begged you to read—and I hope you consider reading the illustrated version. The TV adaptation is expedited and simplified, and with its seemingly small budget, it can hardly portray the cool weirdness illustrated by the book’s artist, Cliff Chiang. But Paper Girls is still worth watching, if only for the interactions—often arguments—between the girls and their adult selves.

In one conversation, one of the more driven girls, Erin, meets the 43-year-old version of herself and doubts that she could ever become the person looking back at her.

“There has to be some explanation … Is my husband coming home soon?” young Erin asks her older self. “Are my kids asleep upstairs?”

“We’re still single,” adult Erin replies.

“Are we happy?”

“That’s a loaded word when you’re my age, kid. Let’s see, I bet you’re obsessed with Growing Pains right now. Right? Well, surprise. The Tiengs aren’t the Seavers. We never were … I’ve just got my house, my job, my dumb little car, and my Xanax.”

“What is your job?”

“I work in the court system.”

“A lawyer?”

“Paralegal … I don’t even remember what I wanted to be when I was your age.”

“A U.S. senator and a mother of four.”

Prime Video

In another conversation, young Erin is so angry and disgusted at what she grows up to become that she lashes out at adult Erin, who defends herself against the naivete of her 12-year-old self.

“Remember in the fourth grade when we had the assembly and they talked about the year 2000?” young Erin asks. “And Mrs. Anderson said, ‘Some of you will have jobs that haven’t even been invented yet.’”

“Why on Earth would I remember that?”

“Did you ever even try to do anything?”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get elected to fucking Congress and shit out four kids.”

“I’m sorry, but you are literally the worst version of how my life could’ve gone!”

“You may think that you know what you want, but the truth is, you have no idea who you even are. You’re a 12-year-old kid.”

Adult Erin’s defensiveness is warranted—everything seems simpler to a 12-year-old kid who doesn’t know how life works. But after my conversation with Leon, I never wanted to feel that way again. It was that year that I decided to be a writer and started a journey that led me to writing Piccolo Is Black, Humans Being, and hopefully a lot more in the future. I would honor my kid self. I would do things that would have made him proud. Last fall, I stopped on the street to take this picture of a wall in downtown Miami with a quote from the late designer Virgil Abloh. It summarized how I felt.

Jordan Calhoun

Only now, after watching young Erin and adult Erin fight about what became of their lives and seeing the other girls interact with their futures, I’m starting to change my mind again. The younger version of myself deserves to be honored—but the truth is, he also has no idea who he is yet. He really is just a 12-year-old kid. He deserves to be honored, but he also needs to learn a bit of compassion and restraint. And maybe my adult self deserves a bit more credit, if not consideration, for who I am today.

I went to Leon’s high-school graduation in 2018 and joked with him about the conversation we had. He didn’t remember the question he’d asked me in his freshman year, so I told him about it, how it affected me, and that I’m working on being a person that kid me would have been proud of. After the graduation ceremony, his classmate John approached me. He was the one who had told me about his struggles at home and how they were affecting him in school.

“Remember that conversation we had in the stairwell? I still remember what you told me,” he said. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember what I had told him. I just replied, “I’m glad.”

Kid me wouldn’t have cared about that moment, but that’s okay. Not everything needs to be about him.

***

Thanks to everyone who responded to my last Humans Being, about Harley Quinn and rediscovering yourself after a hard breakup. The topic is personal enough that I won’t share my favorite responses this week, but I love reading your stories.

I wish that this week’s book giveaway was Long Division by Kiese Laymon, since that’s my favorite book about time travel, but I don’t see it on my bookshelf. I see another book by Laymon, though—Heavy: An American Memoir—so I’ll do that instead. Just send me an email telling me how you think 12-year-old you would feel about present-day you, and I’ll send the book to a random person who hits my inbox. You can reach me at humansbeing@theatlantic.com or find me on Twitter at @JordanMCalhoun.

Jordan Calhoun is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.