'Everyone is nostalgic for 2016. But I can't romanticise a place I barely escaped.'

Reminiscing about 2016 is the hot flavour of the month, but it has left a permanent bad taste in my mouth.

The tropical-flavoured dance music, staying out at the clubs until 3am in ankle-breaking heels, the overdone Rio De Janeiro and Amaro Instagram filters.

There's an idolisation in hindsight, because life for some felt lighter back then, freer. It was a time before social media became a vice, and rage-baiting became an Olympic sport.

And while I understand the nostalgia, if I'm honest, it stirred something unexpected seeing just so many 2016 tributes plastered everywhere.

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Because for some of us, 2016 wasn't a year of blissful nostalgia.

It wasn't carefree.

For me, at the cusp of adulthood, 2016 was a year of survival.

It was the year I was in a domestic abusive relationship. I was living interstate at the time, and felt the most disconnected from my sense of self and home. At that point, I had learnt to shrink myself in order to stay safe.

I felt rudderless in a world that wasn't mine.

For some, 2016 wasn't a golden era. Image: Supplied.

There's a familiar pattern in the way our stories are rewritten over the years — smoothed, distorted, or dismissed — until the version that survives is easier for people to consume.

Part of what made 2016 so complicated for me, was how much of myself I'd already lost by then — and how tightly I clung to the few things that still felt like me.

One of them was Taylor Swift.

That year, she was publicly dismantled, mocked, 'cancelled', before we even had better language for it. I remember getting into a full Romeo-and-Juliet-style argument with colleagues at work over her.

Defending her felt strangely urgent and personal.

At the time, I didn't fully understand why.

Now, I do.

She was my last tether to my girlhood; to softness, to storytelling, to true innocence before loss and grief. To the version of myself that existed before I learnt how to disappear in order to survive.

2016 marked the year Taylor Swift was cancelled. She was the last tether to my girlhood. Image: AP via AAP.

Watching her be villainised — rewritten as something she wasn't — mirrored what I was experiencing privately. I felt cancelled from my own identity too; misunderstood, diminished, spoken over.

That is why her comeback years later felt so vindicating. It was not just professionally impressive, but emotionally corrective.

It was proof that being silenced isn't the same as being finished. That a woman can retreat, regroup, return on her own terms, and soar far beyond what anyone could have imagined.

I didn't have language for that hope in 2016, but I felt it; a reverberation, as if something ahead of me was calling back.

So when that year is celebrated publicly, packaged as a cultural peak, it can feel quietly alienating. Not just triggering in the dramatic sense, but dissonant. Like watching people romanticise a place you barely escaped.

And I want to say this gently, because both things can be true at once: it's okay to celebrate 2016, and it's also okay if you never want to go back there.

We don't often talk about how nostalgia can be selective. How collective memory tends to flatten our experiences into something palatable, something fun, something easy to share online. But behind every 'best year ever' narrative, are people whose lives didn't look anything like that.

People who were grieving, some who were surviving, and others who were doing everything they could just to make it through the next day.

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Happiness and pain exist at once, all around the world, all the time. This isn't a new concept; this paradigm exists each year, and one doesn't take away from the other. I understand the need for hope, and to remember a lightness we feel we've lost as a society. It's just that for some of us, that warmth is found reaching forward — not behind.

If you're someone who feels a quiet heaviness watching 2016 be held up as a golden era — I see you.

I see the version of myself from that year, too.

I'm grateful for her courage. I'm grateful she found her way home, and eventually blasted away all that shackled her life.

But no, I don't miss that year. And I don't want to relive it.

Healing has taught me that we don't owe nostalgia our participation. We don't have to romanticise chapters that cost us too much. Growth doesn't always come with fond memories — sometimes it comes with distance, clarity, relief, and finding peace.

So if 2016 wasn't magical for you, if it was messy or painful or something you'd rather not revisit, you're not bitter. You're not doing nostalgia wrong.

You're just living your own truth, and that deserves space too.

Feature image: Supplied.