It’s been nine years since Rebecca Black released that song.
That song about how “tomorrow is Saturday and afterwards comes Sunday,” but the best day of the week “is Friday, Friday, gotta catch up on Friday.”
Yeah, you know it – the Twitterverse dubbed it one of the worst songs ever. (And if you don’t know it, ummm, where were you all of 2011?)
What most of us didn’t know is just how much bullying and hate the singer copped at the time – when she was just 13 years old – and how much this impacted her.
“Above all things, I just wish I could go back and talk to my 13-year-old self who was terribly ashamed of herself and afraid of the world,” the now-22-year-old writes in an Insta post.
“To my 15-year-old self who had no one to talk to about the depression she faced. To my 17-year-old self who would get to school only to get food thrown at her and her friends. To my 19-year-old self who had almost every producer/songwriter tell me they’d never work with me,” she continues.
Rebecca Black did manage to rack up millions of views on YouTube at the time (now over 138 million!), released a few more songs and even appeared in a Katy Perry video clip later that year.
But almost a decade on, that song is still a weight on her shoulders. And she’s doing her best to move on:
“I’m trying to remind myself more and more that every day is a new opportunity to shift your reality and lift your spirit. You are not defined by any one choice or thing,” she writes.
“Time heals and nothing is finite. It’s a process that’s never too late to begin.”
If there’s anything we can take away from her message, it’s that words hurt – and they can continue to hurt a long time after they’ve been posted online. But no one has to ever be defined by something that happened in the past, and every day really is a new opportunity to move forward.
