Chayma Charifi

Today, social media apps like TikTok are dominated by the phrase “you ate”; a phrase so common that it has now taken its own form as, at least to me, a sentient being with her own voice. All comments with the phrase “you ate,” sound the same to me. You ate. Ate. You 8. Ate down.

And down I will “eat,” to memory lane, where I invite you to think of another eight—twenty–eight–teen—when teens on platforms like the one I mentioned earlier, host of the “you ate” phenomenon, brought forth another trend—the Tide Pod challenge.

You had to be there, but in many ways, you didn’t really have to be. Its impacts are significant, kind of like how if you hadn’t known about Michelle Obama’s adjustment to school lunches when it happened, you would know now by how drastic the effects have been—that level of impact. I face it every ten minutes spent at the laundry room, fighting the child safety lock on my tide pods container.

Teens far and wide, children even, partook in this trend, eating Tide Pods to be a part of something greater than themselves. It would be touching had it not had such dangerous implications. It made me think about forcing a kid to stop saying a bad word by punishing them with soap in their mouth, an ancient abusive parenting tactic. It made me think about purifying oneself—well, not then but now—and how, in pursuit of approval of how we navigate the world, we have forgotten to live in it.

Tide Pods aren’t for consumption. To live is not to feel required to consume only what is clean, to wash your mouth with soap and speak as a “cleaner version of yourself.” To live is to experience life by consuming the present, what is fresh and what is grimey and what you’d prefer to not eat again.

It is about inviting what you have come to like and what you’ve come to abhor and then to carry yourself into the world as a contradiction of moments, of clean and unclean—with clothing adorned with stains that tell stories of life, not neglectfully dirty or perfectly clean. Clothes that are a little dirtier today with the toothpaste on the jacket that you forgot to wipe clean, with mouths that are grimey, not with filth you’ve taken days to wash—but with the tastelessness of the morning gossip you were forced to indulge in, with a side of crepes.

It’s easy to romanticize purity and shame messiness—both in our outward appearance and in the curated, internal versions of ourselves that we present to the world. But living is not wearing a clean shirt or saying the “right” things. There’s beauty in the filth and the upkeep. Permitting messiness doesn’t mean being neglectful of taking care of yourself and the world around you. It means allowing yourself to be messy in the process of building yourself up. To partake in the meaningless gossip and wash your mind and mouth from the filth at a later time because you know you have the power to rinse off the filth when you’ve wrapped up your day, reflecting on your morning conversation while brushing your teeth that evening—perhaps with a vow to not gossip anymore.

Striking this balance isn’t about what we consume—it is how we digest it and process it outwardly. The pursuit of living the “right way” can be helpful in giving us a map of how to live our life; however, it shouldn’t deter us from accepting the messiness of truly living a life.

A clean mouth shouldn’t be at the expense of a meal. A clean mind shouldn’t be at the expense of the life experiences that make it worth cleaning.