About The Writer

                   

I was born in the desert on a US Air Force Base soon after the Vietnam War came to an end. 

My earliest memories include my Great Grandfather from the Lost Generation leaning over my crib to make me smile. 

I remember the way the snowflakes fell in New Mexico winters and the pure magic of Rankin Bass holiday specials being on TV.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

I was a tot of the late 1970's - my red hair turned to blonde and my blonde hair turned almost white from the desert sun - I was an old soul so it was a good fit. My memories from this era include watching New Zoo Revue and looking through my red, white, and blue Bicentennial View Master at Sigmund and the Sea Monsters 3D reels. I would run around the neighborhood with friends and run around the backyard with my dog Lulu. 

I remember playing with Fisher-Price Little People and mini Muppet Show characters in a metal Wolverine brand dollhouse made in a 1950's architectural style even though the post-war 'golden years' had long since departed by the time I came into the world. 

I was a child of the Cold War. 

Most of my growing up years took place during the Reagan Administration when it was supposed to be "Morning in America" though I don't remember it feeling that way for more than a very short time. A portion of my elementary school years were spent in Tornado Alley, so our safety drills doubled as nuclear drills. I was deeply affected by the death of Samantha Smith, a young Gen X ambassador for understanding and reconciliation at that time. Near the end of the Cold War, I watched the January 1986 Challenger Disaster happen live from a classroom in my elementary school along with millions of other Gen Xers. I will never forget the sting of losing all seven of my heroes in the same moment. A lifetime later, I found out that my father was one of the people who worked at NASA to ensure a disaster like that would never happen again. This was an important part of my journey of intergenerational forgiveness and you can read about it on this blog. 

I was in my Gen X preteen and very early teenage years as the late 1980's rolled into the early 1990's. 

This is when I was sporting a Swatch, and I'm pretty sure my candy-striped shirts were heading quickly out of style just as I was buying them with my babysitting money from a second hand store. I'm second wave Gen X, though these stripes were probably originally owned by a first wave Gen Xer. And you are officially Generation X if you have a posed picture with starlight-camera flashes in the background! 

The world was spinning quickly as the 1980's ended, and Gen X was growing up fast.

This was the era of Tiananmen Square Protests, the Exxon Valdeez oil spill and when the Berlin Wall came down. 

Of cassette tapes I listened to in my Walkman, U2's Joshua Tree was what I listened to most. And their next album, Rattle and Hum was the first CD I ever bought. They are still my favorite band. 

This was also the era when my Millennial siblings were born. My brother now works for Google, a company that makes this blog possible, and my sister is a pediatric cardiologist who takes care of the hearts of the children in the youngest generations (Gen Z and Gen Alpha). I am so proud of them both. 

I was a teenager of the Grunge Era. I saw some of the greatest bands of the mid 1990's live from the front row, and was a battle-born contender of the mosh pits. In those days I was dying my hair with kool-aid and working minimum wage jobs. I was coming of age right as the culture history of Gen X pivoted. As a high school freshman, I could see the influence of first-wave Gen X culture as upperclassmen wearing Van Halen tee shirts passed me by in the hallways. Then, a couple of years later, the (alternative) pop culture of second-wave Gen X took over and friends wearing Pearl Jam tee shirts would wave to me from down the hall. While Breakfast Club set the tone for my earlier high school years, Singles set the tone for the later ones. The Grunge Era was still with me later on when I moved to the Pacific Northwest where I lived in Portland, Oregon from 2003-2014.

I was a college student and temp-worker of the Dot Com Era. Postmodernism and globalization were unfolding as I worked on my degree and entered the workforce, knowing that each of my temp jobs, from loan processing to paralegal work, might come to an end in three weeks or even three days. It was during my college years that I started studying Generation X and writing academic papers about our generation. In my research, I discovered that whether we grew up tens or thousands of miles away from each other, whether we thought we were alone as every aspect of society disintegrated around us in our growing-up years, as a generation we have a thousand things in common. 

Generation X moves into the dorm...

A quick look at the wall on my side of my freshman dorm room: The Pubs of London, a poster I bought after being evacuated off the London subway from a bomb scare, a Cranberries poster I bought from a Sam Goody store, a bumper sticker I got in San Felipe, Mexico, a picture of U2 recording their Achtung Baby album, a framed bag I got from the Hard Rock Cafe in Paris, and a picture of the Grand Canyon which I got see when I was 18. I never did learn to surf but I sure wanted to when I was 19. I still haven't seen New York, but I sure hope to someday. 

From Y2K to the Pandemic: I was in my early 20s, and lived in middle America when the clock turned from Dec. 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000 and we were all bracing for Y2K. I was a stay at home mom in 2020 when those of us from my neighborhood had to unexpectedly go pick our children up from the carpool lane as the school shut down, when our city shut down, when our state, California, was the first one in the US to go into lockdown. Generation X is well acquainted with trauma, and has lived from one Crisis to another both in childhood and in adulthood. I have gotten every major variant and have survived covid five times, but just barely. It has been a hard life, and a good life, and a full life.

A Gen Xer in Midlife: I've been in the Bay Area with my husband and daughter since 2014. During my daughter's elementary school years I helped lead Project Cornerstone at her school - a Silicon Valley program that helps children with developmental assets, including character building, being an 'upstander' for yourself and others, and having positive cultural identity. My first degree was in theology, and now I'm a semi-retired chaplain. My second degree was in law which gave me a background to do all kinds of work. With a lifelong love of volunteer and nonprofit work, I currently work remotely from CA as an intern at Tambourine PR, a business that provides public relations services to local, state, and federal agencies in OK and TX. This is all thanks to Jennifer McCollum, another, even better, Gen X blogger, who is mentoring me as I go back to work after years of being a volunteer and stay at home mom. I'm raising a Gen Z teenage daughter who shows me love and light all the time. I have passed on to her all the good things form those Gen X growing up years, from skee ball to School House Rock. 

Writing is my ultimate calling, and I've been blogging about Generation X for over a decade. I sometimes get to go on journeys around America to write about and take pictures of places from monuments to memorials which are deeply significant to the Gen X experience. I'm fascinated by history, generational theory, and the pop culture that influenced our formative years as Generation X; I also love learning about the historical events and collective experiences that shape all generations. 

My spiritual journey as a Gen Xer has been stitched together with felt, stained glass, incense, icons, and pixels. This path began with learning about the Gospel on a flannelgraph storyboard in my preschool days to studying tht world's religions in my college days. I have sought spiritual direction from Catholic nuns and sensed the presence of God as I looked upon the giant stained glass windows of Paris's Notre Dame. And while cathedral windows can be beautiful, sometimes the presence of God can be found in an even more real way in places of simplicity and hard work. I have been a hospital chaplain and I have done relief work in Mexico. I worked in Ireland as a camp counselor during the summer of 1999, at the start of a truce with 400 years of religious history depending on it. I have attended liturgy with Orthodox monks, who, naturally, had one been the counterculture punks of Generation X. Any person or culture I served gave me more and taught me more than I could have ever taught them. More and more over time, I have seen the way so much truth can be found in multiple religions. To start out as a Christian, and to expand outward is like following the silver threads woven into the fabric of altar cloths, and to see them as timelines of history where all the major religions teach the importance of loving one another. And it's important to eventually learn to love ourselves, too. These days, I value every part of my journey. As an open-minded, ecumenical Christian, I love the work and writing of Rachel Held Evans, Madeleine L'Engle, Richard Rohr, and Rob Bell. To look further back in history, I love the wisdom of Buddhism, and I love Rumi and other mystics. 

You can call me Chloe, a name I took on my 20s, or you can call me by my original name which was a whole lot more Gen X: Tiffany. Or you can call me Chloe-Tiff, whatever works. 

If there is a bigger picture here to it all from the 1970s until now...

What I could not know as a toddler learning to walk on shag carpet was how all the boom and bust that accompanied the transition into the new millennium would affect my life, from the cities and towns I lived in to the jobs I would work. During the height of the Oil Boom in the early 1980's, I was learning to fly a private plane just as the training wheels were coming off my bike - I knew that this, together with the Cadillac in our garage and the caviar in our fridge were empty status symbols of the time. When the mid-80's bust came, I remember newly jobless people leaving town as fast as possible. I remember the anxiety I felt standing on the main street of my small desert town on the Texas-New Mexico border, grappling with recession and poverty, where wealth evaporated like morning dew. The 1980's taught me to hold everything I own loosely and that materialism is pointless. The 1990's revealed the importance of turning away from all that had gone wrong in society in the previous decades, though I eventually learned not to get pulled so far down into 90's nihilistic thinking that I would lose all hope. Because sometimes all we have is hope. When we see the collective experience we have with others, with our generation, we see how not alone we are. This is grace; this is hope. May it be that through the light of the pixels in this digital space, this hope and grace and hope reaches you. 

Thank you for reading, thank you for being here. 

contact: genxpixels(at)gmail

(c) 2011-2024 Chloe Koffas, all rights reserved on my photos and life story