Talk About it Tuesday
As I have been transcribing my journals lately, I have found myself in volume 7, which takes place in the spring of 1998. I was 15 years old and in the 10th grade then.
April was particularly eventful. That month saw me sitting in the back of the school bus with a boy that everybody on the bus thought I was doing something sexual with back there. I wasn’t. But for the remainder of that school year and the rest of the years until I graduated, people at school made sure I remembered what I had supposedly done.
In addition to that, some of the girls who didn’t particularly like me, stole my floppy disk from the bin at the front of our keyboarding classroom. Stupidly, I had used that disk to type my journal when we had free time in class. I substituted words like “jello” for “sex” so that I wouldn’t get in trouble for using words like that on a school computer. Those girls took it upon themselves to take my disk and print several copies of my lengthy journal for them to read and share amongst themselves before school.
My parents had told me to ignore them. They insisted that’s what bullies want, a reaction. My first idea was to get in their faces and defend myself, but I listened to my parents. Big mistake. I should have gotten in their faces.
But, that month had some good to it too. During spring break, I went with my best friend at the time, to visit her family in the mountains of North Carolina. That’s where I met her cousin Sam. That’s not his real name, of course. Sam was my age and over the course of the first two days we were there, he and I were very flirty with each other. On the evening of the second day, we hooked up. At 15 years old, “hooking up” meant making out in their grandma’s basement. For whatever reason, it made my best friend super mad. I don’t know why. As I’ve been re-reading my description of that weekend and all the things she did and said about us is just very weird to me. Like, she was really mad about it. Sam and I weren’t though. We did a lot of kissing and snuggling before we left on the third day.
This brings me to my “talking point” for today. Teen angst had me in an intense grip back then. When I got home from that trip, I cried every day for a couple of weeks because I missed Sam so much! I wrapped myself up in a blanket he and I had shared and cried while listening to songs that made me think of him. I repeatedly wrote about how much pain I was in from missing him. He and I talked on the phone several times, we exchanged letters. But I never saw him again. And eventually, I got over him. Which, at 15 years old is expected when you’re talking about a boy that lives 100 miles away and neither of you can drive yet.
As I was reading about my heart breaking because I missed this boy I only knew for 3 days and made out with a few times (kind of sounds like why everyone is mad at Rose in “Titanic” for being so obsessed over a boy she only knew for the same amount of time)—as I was reading about this, I kind of started missing all that teen angst. I got to thinking, which is better, teen angst or adult angst? There are very different things that cause you pain as a teenager versus when you’re an adult. And when you’re an adult is it even considered “angst”?
Google says “angst” is a feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition of the state of the world in general. I saw an informal definition as “a feeling of persistent worry about something trivial.“ That definitely sounds like angst is not common for adults.
Things that make me cry as an adult and things that made me cry as a teenager are/were very important to me at the time. (Except movies, I’ll cry during a movie or tv show without hesitation). Those things that make me cry feel big. But I think as a teenager, I got over them much faster. They weren’t as big as they felt. Missing Sam and crying over him felt like a big deal. But after a couple months, I felt nothing towards him anymore. Maybe if we lived closer and I saw him again it would be different. As an adult, there are losses and things that happened years ago that I still get choked up about sometimes and feel strongly about when I think about it.
I could analyze this even further and get into which I prefer. Do I prefer the teen angst? Or the adult traumas? I could get into the meaning behind things that bothered me when I was young and how they did or did not affect me in the long run versus how adult issues affect me now. But I won’t get that analytical about it. I’ll just say, they are each different and important to life and who I am as a person in their own way. In other words, I wouldn’t be who I am today without all of it.
Want to help me accomplish my dream of being a paid writer? Buy me a coffee!
Leave a Reply