The artifact I chose to submit is one of the very few things I have with me from my childhood, much less what I have from my childhood that I brought with me to college. My situation-without going into too much detail, was a very precarious one that left me with almost nothing from my life before entering the foster youth system, making whatever I did have special for me. Even more so because the exact day I was officially entered into the system, I was wearing nothing but the clothes on my back, and wasn’t sure if I would ever see some of the things that sat in my childhood bedroom ever again.
Moreover, what this DVD represents for me is what was there for me and something I have sort of clung to since my time within the system, the media. In a time where everything is uncertain, left up in the air (which, for someone as anxious as I am, was pretty close to hell on earth), one of the things I could rely on was the media. Books, movies, and in this particular case, TV shows. Even if I had no idea where to find the bathroom, if I had no contact with family or any direction whatsoever, I was able to find solace and comfort in the same episodes of Scooby-Doo I’d seen a billion times. Even if I was in a different bed, a different city, surrounded by different people, I could always count on the episodes to play out exactly as I recalled, so familiar I could recount them in my sleep.
As I’ve gotten older, I still find lots of comfort in rewatching and remembering these episodes and all sorts of other shows and movies. It’s a bit cheesy, but it’s comforting and brings me back to all sorts of times in my life. Even though I know every episode like the back of my hand, every rewatch offers me something different, a new introspection into who I was, what was going on in my life the last time I watched. Not only that, it has allowed me to learn that even though I don’t know what’s gonna happen the second that episode ends, I find comfort in the fact that the next time I’ll have circled back to this DVD, this episode, and everything will have worked out.