What This Decade Means to Me

Noah Tesfaye
4 min readDec 29, 2019

Maybe a week ago, I was doing my usual hourly scroll through my Twitter feed when I stumbled across something one of my friends from college tweeted this:

When I think about this decade, to know how much of school I’ve gone through in just ten years, it’s a bit baffling (much like the meme attached to the tweet above). Elementary, middle, high, and now the college has all happened within just ten years, in one decade. I went from being nine to eighteen, went through three schools, two and a half console generations, iPhone 4 launch to iPhone 11 Pro launch, and most of all forged the relationships that helped shape who I am today.

Decade wrap-ups are sometimes cliche, and I’m well aware of the fact that many just recap the trends and experiences of us within the lens of politics and/or pop culture. But for my generation, for the people my age, we’ve gone from children to teens, and now adults (legally, but maybe not behaviorally). In 2010, I was only thinking about planning the next baked good I wanted to make or when I was heading to a friend’s house to play Shaun White Snowboarding: World Stage. My fashion sense consisted of whatever my mom thought was cool and hip for kids. I was in third grade, ice skating every single Friday with my friends, eating Safeway chicken tenders and begging to go to Baskin Robbins a few blocks away.

In 2010, I didn’t grasp the concept of what it meant to be a black kid in America. I knew I was different from most of my peers growing up in Silicon Valley, who were white and Asian, but I never saw myself as sharing a particularly unique experience or having to deal with a variety of situations that only I would go through. I knew the history of black people in America, but I didn’t quite understand how I played into it all. All I knew at the time was that I loved learning about the past and that I wanted to one day do something related to politics.

In 2010, I wasn’t fearful of nearly anything. To the credit of where I grew up and how much time my mom spend with my brother and me, many of the hardships in…

Noah Tesfaye

Just someone trying to share my story and find who I am, one post at a time