what's in my room? featuring Jessica Jackson of Jessica Unnamed

a new series that's MTV Cribs meets In My Room with writers I really love

When I met

Jessica Jackson

at the reading

Alex Lewis

and I threw at the end of March, I immediately knew I wanted to be her friend.

I’d been a fan of her newsletter,

Jessica Unnamed

for a minute. Her writing strikes this balance between deep empathy and tenderness that’s nearly impossible to find on an Internet where it feels like everyone is rushing to the next trend, the next attention-grabbing thing, the next problem to profit off of. Whether she’s writing about fires erupting across LA, or her son’s most recent trip around the sun, when her newsletter lands in my inbox, I’m immediately clicking to open because reading her work is like being in the company of a friend you haven’t talked to in years but who picks up the phone like no time has passed at all.

So I was really over the moon when, within minutes of us meeting IRL, Jessica said we should collab and then DM’d me so many good ideas that it was hard to pick just one. But when Jesse suggested doing a time capsule style post where we talked about different items or pieces of media from when we were teenagers that inspired us, I immediately started thinking about all the weird stuff I kept in my teenage bedroom.

I’ve spent the last ten years writing a book about girls’ bedroom culture, and the more I write and talk to y’all, the more I realize that the private spaces we carved out for ourselves as teenagers are what we really carry with us forever. I bet you can’t remember the name of that one crush who never noticed you, but you can still remember what it felt like to lay on the floor of your bedroom, listening to that one record you still put on today. Even if you didn’t have a bedroom proper, you probably dreamed about having one. I know I did when my sister and I shared a room.

So, whether real or imagined or something you’re creating right now, our bedrooms were (and are) the places where we started first exploring what makes us who we are. And that’s kind of what I want this series to be about — the objects you held onto or seek out that help you feel like you, a teenage bedroom of the soul, if you will.

But let me stop yapping and let’s find out…

Jessica Jackson

, what’s in your room?

When we originally brainstormed on what would become this collaboration, I was extremely giddy. Probably (definitely) fan-girling. When I was introduced to your work through Alex, I felt a wash of nostalgia. I was a girl once! I wanted tap into it because there is something pure about our era of girlhood. We didn’t have “influencers” like we do today or social media—fuck some of us didn’t even have home computers. Girlhood was this unique time where we were able to grow rapidly but possibly still retain your innocence and ignorance. Those “artifacts” ignite the memories from that time. Hence the capsule idea. Celebrating (and cringing) over the souvenirs of our former selves.

A worn copy of a dELIA’s catalog

Because what teenaged girl of the early 2000s didn’t dream of frolicking in corduroy flared jeans and a cropped monkey tee? Being raised by a single mother putting her kids through Catholic school also meant having to forgo my aspirations of being a quintessential IT girl, (accessories not included). Yet, I still couldn’t resist flipping through catalogs like dELIA’s with adolescent fervor, combing each seasonal offering while racking up unrealistic figures for my life-changing wardrobe. I just could not fathom asking my mother for Roxy crew neck $28. That was enough to buy a bag of groceries, a Little Caeser’s pizza, and a DVD from Family Video. That would be like $459.73 now with inflation. Plus shipping and handling? Forget about it.

My favorites were athletic wear and indie scruff—I’m talking Macramé chokers and nylon track pants, black platform Mary-Janes, bucket hats and messenger bags. I wanted to be a walking coat hanger à la Mary-Kate and Ashley, Aaliyah’s quirky younger cousin. I remember staring at all those bright eyed, acne-free models and thinking How could they be so lucky?” I fantasized about what it would be like to stand next to them in a equally cheesy, archaic pose, smiling so hard that their cheeks almost matched their cherry Smackers lip balm. Maybe I would be perched regally in a neon blowup chair, donning floral capri pants and dramatic silver bangles, eyeing the camera coyly while having an imaginary conversation over one of those transparent landline phones. A post-90’s goddess immortalized in glossy print.

CD player + headset

Cds—remember those? I believe the first one I ever owned was Tatiana Ali’s single “Daydreamin’” back in 1998—pre-teen contraband that my father had confiscated during one of his infrequent visits, believing it would fan the flames of puberty-driven passion and I would end up a tragic guest on Maury or Ricki Lake, scowl faced and pregnant. Although I had crushes (Da’Ron, Marcus, Luis, Theo, etc.) I was a more serious student of the art of yearning itself than actualizing the temporary affections of my counterparts who were more obsessed with fart jokes and WWE. I still had plenty of time to ruin my life because of boys.

When I transitioned to high school, I developed an intense obsession with groups like Taking Back Sunday, Damian Rice, and Yellowcard—much to my sister’s chagrin. We shared a room and I was obnoxious, often playing the same album over and over. My favorite band at the time was Incubus. Yes, I loved them (ever since watching their music video for “Stellar” during an episode of TRL). And my crush for their lead singer, Brandon Boyd, was completely unreasonable, like all parasocial relationships, which made me love them more. I remember listening to A Crow Left of the Murder religiously while cleaning the blackboards after school as a work-study student, using the chalky water to make figure eights. Wiping down desks and emptying trash cans made my tuition more manageable (mostly) but there was something wistful about the solitude it afforded me those late afternoons, managing the financial crevasse and emotional cleft my father left behind with the depth of my longing, letting my emotions whiz and whirl along with my cd player tucked precariously in the pocket of my school uniform.

A print out of an AIM conversation

Before SnapChats and Instagram DMs, AOL ruled supreme, where teens and young adults would congregate the virtual halls of AIM messenger and chatrooms. I had not been kissed—yet—but you wouldn’t know it the way my fingertips tapped danced across the family computer keyboard with such bravado. It didn’t matter that I never had a boyfriend. I was still irresistibly clever, and, at the very least, not a Black girl who strained against the weight of cultural desirability, sequestered in the tortuous castle of unrequited love.

Because I went to an all girl Catholic highschool, my interactions with XY chromosomes were fairly limited to church and the guy friends I had made from neighboring cities through Speech and Debate (Go Tarhe District!). I was so good with making friends with the fellas that it was a running joke with my teammates. Had a crush? Chances were I already knew what school he was from, his phone number, and that his little sister had a tree nut allergy. My humor was disarming and I had the enough curiosity and (possibly lack of shame) to talk to almost anyone. I relished being a walking rolodex.

And I managed to find crushes for myself. There was Tony, the sweet, doe-eyed Gemini who ended up buying me a deluxe copy of LOTR and then Nathan, the sardonic Sagittarius who I quickly bonded with over with music. Communication via emails and Instant Messenger chats allowed for shamelessly chatting and flirting to exceed the egregiously limited text and chat phone plans of yesteryear.

We weren’t professing love but playfully poking at it, kind of like a bee flitting nervously over a flower. We would talk about stuff teens do, random pop culture tidbits and school drama, but there were be these intermittent moments full of clunky romantic bids, subliminal pulling of the pigtails. It was exhilarating. I would print them out and scour the text like a delicious romance novel, relaughing at all the jokes, analyzing the time stamps. I had a stack of them, my first forays with romance, captured on white, 8x11 printer paper with dog-eared corners.

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what’s in my room?

Seeing as this is the inaugural what’s in my room?, I wanted to jump in and share a few things from my teenage bedroom that made me who I am today.

…baby one more time by Britney Spears cassette tape

I don’t have a lot of regrets in life, but losing this cassette tape is one of them. And even though in high school and told everyone (via my high school newspaper) that my first record was Bright Eye’s I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (2004), that was a fucking lie because the REAL first record I ever owned was …baby one more time by Britney Spears (1999).

Why did I lie about my first record? Because in 2004 pop music was not something to be enjoyed. And no matter how many times we screamed that we were so Julia this past summer or how eagerly we’re anticipating the new Addison Rae album, those of us who were teenage girls in the early 00s know that we denounced our idols in favor of boys who played acoustic guitars and wrote songs about their girlfriends cheating on them so we could appear interesting to that one guy who wasn’t exactly popular but was really cute and liked The Smiths. You did it. You can’t lie to me.

And yeah I guess the lesson here is not to lie about pop music ever. Because the gods of pop are fickle and they will take away your Britney Spears cassette tape if you disrespect them.

really old laptop from Goodwill

As chronically online as I was when I was a teenager, I didn’t get a functional computer of my own until I was in college. I mostly used the family computer in our basement, but honestly, I needed more privacy to draft my Lord of the Rings fanfic where I made all the hobbits kiss before heading into Mordor. I had a bad habit of collecting cast-off items people in my house or on my street didn’t want (broken bookshelves, barely functioning tape decks, other pieces of cast-off furniture), so when I finally got my license and could drive myself to the Goodwill at the strip mall ten minutes from my house, I was on the hunt for a laptop.

I have no idea what the make or model was of the laptop I finally found after scouring the back aisles of Goodwill for most of the summer. All I knew is that it turned on and had a word processor on it, and that was enough for me. It looked like a piece of grey space rock and weighed way more than was necessary, but it was mine for like $10 and so I hauled it back to my bedroom, feeling like I was about to become Joan Didion. Or at least, write a lot of smutty queer fanfic late into the night.

And I did. I also wrote essays and lists of stuff I could put in my zine and journal entries, never really bothered by the fact that this ancient laptop could barely boot up and definitely couldn’t connect to the Internet, which meant none of that writing I did could see the light of day.

The lord works in mysterious ways for real.

Sassy magazine

Ok so this one isn’t true. Serialized between 1988 and 1996, Sassy was over well before I was a teenager. But when I stumbled across the magazine somewhere on the Internet (around the same time I discovered zines), I knew that a magazine that saw fashion, pop culture, DIY, and Rolling Stone-esque journalism (if Rolling Stone was run by teenage girls) as all equally valuable was something I needed in my life.

For as long as I’ve been a collector of print media, I never got my hands on an issue of Sassy until a few weeks ago when I impulse bought a lot of five off eBay. And then I was shocked to learn that a lot of y’all had never heard of Sassy, so I made a video that gets into the history of the magazine and how we might have Sassy to thank for all the girl bloggers on Substack.

what’s in YOUR room?

As many of y’all know, I did a little giveaway to celebrate hitting 2k readers and all you had to do was be a subscriber and tell me one thing from your teenage bedroom that you have (or wish you still had). And, while I wish I could give you all your own Labubus, I am super thrilled to share that

not-quite-dead poets society

is our winner!!!!!

And this is what they kept from their teenage bedroom:

Quest, if you’re reading this, shoot me a DM with your address and I will send out your prize!!!

If you made it this far, thank you so so much for reading! And huge thank you to Jesse for being my first ever collab here on Internet Bedroom and for being so generous with her art and her inspiration <3 <3 Please go show her some love and subscribe to her newsletter and read more of her brilliant work!

I’ve been working hard on this month’s zine of stuff I love, and I can’t wait to share all my finds with you, so upgrade your subscription now to get a digital zine in your inbox every month <3