on turning twenty tomorrow
I am not entirely certain what I make of today being my last day as a teenager.
It's something I can never have again, you know? And while a lot of it was dreadful, and while I barely fit in with teenagers anyway, I'm reluctant to let it go. It's been part of me for so long, in a strange sort of way.
It is amusing to think that my thirteen-year-old self might not recognise me today. I'd like to go back in time, take her hand, and say, "Your music sucks. Listen to even more of Dad's than you already do. The Solas is good, it'll be your saving grace in the end."
Also, "Don't worry. It'll take a while, but someday you'll find people outside of your family who love you, to whom you can give love in return."
And, "Don't let them tell you not to be so enthusiastic. Love everything you love with both arms wide open. It'll hurt trying to regain the ground you lost when you were stifling yourself."
And, "It's okay. There are other people in the world who feel the way you do. And it can be fixed."
And, "Brush your gorram hair."
And, "Someday you will be a redhead."
And, "You think the internet is amazing now? You just wait. You just wait."
And, "Yes, you will get to hang out with your best friend in person."
And, "You will be beautiful and confident. Mostly. You'll be happy and comfortable in your body. But you're still going to crash into doorjambs and coffee tables all the time. As your twentieth birthday dawns you will have several very large and ugly bruises and scrapes from a) running into a door as it was closing, b) running into the corner of something pointy, c) God knows what, but they're everywhere. It's okay, though; who cares?"
And, "Disturb the universe."
--
I suppose the door is closing itself anyway: which is sort of a relief in some ways. Somehow, there are few things more uncomfortable than trying to socialise with other teenagers. The lines aren't nearly so firmly drawn after that. After high school, people turn into so many different things. At twenty, my mother was married. Others are in college. Others know what they want to do, and go to do it. Others have no plans, and continue to live like teenagers. Others, like me, are awkwardly trying to grow up without an instruction manual. You're less expected to always try to befriend your age-mates, or fit in with them -- of course there's the eternal pressure to fit in with the world at large, to be normal (whatever the hell that is), but it's different, it's wider.
Which is good, because I never did fit in with my age mates, except for the rare like-minded ones, and even now, when I am so much more comfortable in my own skin and my own mind (also the medication helped), it's still a strain. I didn't even have the common ground of having gone to high school -- and for some reason questions asked of homeschoolers are nearly always uniformly idiotic: "So, you get to go to school in your pyjamas?" or "I bet it's easier!" (Answer to both: Not so much. Besides, what's so great about pyjamas anyway?) And me with my weird heavy books and folk music festivals and no cable television and casual large words and head full of stories and historical trivia and invented languages was just as alien to them as they were to me. (Oddly enough, I was also the only one amongst most of my peers who wore full make-up most of the time.) The last time I was in a group of strange teenagers -- a Sunday School -- I realised that the last threads had been cut. We don't have to do this any more. I can gravitate towards people who make me comfortable. (I mean, obviously, there's college, there are future co-workers, but... it's different. There's something about teenage society in particular that's always seemed suffocating to me.)
I don't know if I have regrets, exactly. I'm sure that everyone can look back at the last eight years of their life and find things that they regret -- and I certainly can -- but there are, I don't know, different sorts of regrets. I can't change anything now. I wish I'd been more proactive about college, yes, but two years ago I wouldn't have been preparing for library science, and I've never felt so joyfully right in an occupation as I have since I started thinking about becoming a librarian. I wish I'd been better with people, but only half of that was my fault -- I don't think even I understood, at that point, the depth of my mind's not-okay-ness, and why the simplest acts of socialising were so horrifyingly difficult for me and so easy for everyone else. I wish I hadn't spent so much of my youth crippled by depression, angry and miserable and trying to swim up-current just to live, but... I'm mostly okay now. It's over. I wish I'd finished a novel. (But I put out an album.) I really wish I'd gone to see the upright bass and cello workshop with Rushad Eggleston and Missy Raines and somebody else (Ben Sollee?) at Grey Fox that one year; it was definitely a crime to skip it for whichever stage I went to instead. I wish Deathly Hallows had somehow not come out the day it did so I could have had both my magical Grey Fox experience (Nickel Creek playing past two, staring up at the stars for an hour afterwards) and the only Harry Potter release party I was a fan in time for.
I worry a little wistfully about having passed through my teenage years without once having fallen in love, without even having seriously fancied any real person. I would like very much to fall in love, even if everyone says it isn't like the stories. (Silly people, haven't you noticed that the stories are often full of pain and grief too?)
Of course, technically, nothing really changes from today to tomorrow. (I still can't buy alcohol in the U.S. My twenty-first birthday will not involve any loud trips to bars or any drunkenness to speak of, but there will definitely be some red wine or blueberry lager in there somewhere.) I am simply an overly philosophical person with a fondness for symbolism and ritual. I do not have to stop doing my favourite wonderful childish things -- laughing with my girls, wearing false moustaches, talking to fictional people, chasing the cats, dancing in the kitchen -- and I do not have to put on a suit (I could though; suits are hot) and do something Impressive and Businessy and Adult. (I do have to finish applying to Duquesne, and hopefully somehow inherit a lot of money from a forgotten relation, but those are always-plans, and good ones. Well, okay, not the last bit. That is a terrible plan.) Half of my close friends are already out of teenager-hood themselves, and I've never willingly been one who changes to fit a certain illogical standard. And I want to grow up, in the right sort of way -- become a (professional) writer and a librarian, and fall in love, and have children, and homeschool them, and disturb the universe as much as I possibly can.
There's a certain willowy romance about being a teenage girl, though, and I'll miss it. The characters in YA novels will always be younger than me now, even though most of them already have been for a while. I'm passing into a different world, as metaphysical as its boundaries may be. And I like nineteen, that curved, elegantly not-even number; though twenty has a certain mellifluousness of its own (even if it is an even number, and I've never really liked them; they seem smug).
I think I shall finish this pot of tea, and then go to the park for a while to swing on the swings.
It's something I can never have again, you know? And while a lot of it was dreadful, and while I barely fit in with teenagers anyway, I'm reluctant to let it go. It's been part of me for so long, in a strange sort of way.
It is amusing to think that my thirteen-year-old self might not recognise me today. I'd like to go back in time, take her hand, and say, "Your music sucks. Listen to even more of Dad's than you already do. The Solas is good, it'll be your saving grace in the end."
Also, "Don't worry. It'll take a while, but someday you'll find people outside of your family who love you, to whom you can give love in return."
And, "Don't let them tell you not to be so enthusiastic. Love everything you love with both arms wide open. It'll hurt trying to regain the ground you lost when you were stifling yourself."
And, "It's okay. There are other people in the world who feel the way you do. And it can be fixed."
And, "Brush your gorram hair."
And, "Someday you will be a redhead."
And, "You think the internet is amazing now? You just wait. You just wait."
And, "Yes, you will get to hang out with your best friend in person."
And, "You will be beautiful and confident. Mostly. You'll be happy and comfortable in your body. But you're still going to crash into doorjambs and coffee tables all the time. As your twentieth birthday dawns you will have several very large and ugly bruises and scrapes from a) running into a door as it was closing, b) running into the corner of something pointy, c) God knows what, but they're everywhere. It's okay, though; who cares?"
And, "Disturb the universe."
--
I suppose the door is closing itself anyway: which is sort of a relief in some ways. Somehow, there are few things more uncomfortable than trying to socialise with other teenagers. The lines aren't nearly so firmly drawn after that. After high school, people turn into so many different things. At twenty, my mother was married. Others are in college. Others know what they want to do, and go to do it. Others have no plans, and continue to live like teenagers. Others, like me, are awkwardly trying to grow up without an instruction manual. You're less expected to always try to befriend your age-mates, or fit in with them -- of course there's the eternal pressure to fit in with the world at large, to be normal (whatever the hell that is), but it's different, it's wider.
Which is good, because I never did fit in with my age mates, except for the rare like-minded ones, and even now, when I am so much more comfortable in my own skin and my own mind (also the medication helped), it's still a strain. I didn't even have the common ground of having gone to high school -- and for some reason questions asked of homeschoolers are nearly always uniformly idiotic: "So, you get to go to school in your pyjamas?" or "I bet it's easier!" (Answer to both: Not so much. Besides, what's so great about pyjamas anyway?) And me with my weird heavy books and folk music festivals and no cable television and casual large words and head full of stories and historical trivia and invented languages was just as alien to them as they were to me. (Oddly enough, I was also the only one amongst most of my peers who wore full make-up most of the time.) The last time I was in a group of strange teenagers -- a Sunday School -- I realised that the last threads had been cut. We don't have to do this any more. I can gravitate towards people who make me comfortable. (I mean, obviously, there's college, there are future co-workers, but... it's different. There's something about teenage society in particular that's always seemed suffocating to me.)
I don't know if I have regrets, exactly. I'm sure that everyone can look back at the last eight years of their life and find things that they regret -- and I certainly can -- but there are, I don't know, different sorts of regrets. I can't change anything now. I wish I'd been more proactive about college, yes, but two years ago I wouldn't have been preparing for library science, and I've never felt so joyfully right in an occupation as I have since I started thinking about becoming a librarian. I wish I'd been better with people, but only half of that was my fault -- I don't think even I understood, at that point, the depth of my mind's not-okay-ness, and why the simplest acts of socialising were so horrifyingly difficult for me and so easy for everyone else. I wish I hadn't spent so much of my youth crippled by depression, angry and miserable and trying to swim up-current just to live, but... I'm mostly okay now. It's over. I wish I'd finished a novel. (But I put out an album.) I really wish I'd gone to see the upright bass and cello workshop with Rushad Eggleston and Missy Raines and somebody else (Ben Sollee?) at Grey Fox that one year; it was definitely a crime to skip it for whichever stage I went to instead. I wish Deathly Hallows had somehow not come out the day it did so I could have had both my magical Grey Fox experience (Nickel Creek playing past two, staring up at the stars for an hour afterwards) and the only Harry Potter release party I was a fan in time for.
I worry a little wistfully about having passed through my teenage years without once having fallen in love, without even having seriously fancied any real person. I would like very much to fall in love, even if everyone says it isn't like the stories. (Silly people, haven't you noticed that the stories are often full of pain and grief too?)
Of course, technically, nothing really changes from today to tomorrow. (I still can't buy alcohol in the U.S. My twenty-first birthday will not involve any loud trips to bars or any drunkenness to speak of, but there will definitely be some red wine or blueberry lager in there somewhere.) I am simply an overly philosophical person with a fondness for symbolism and ritual. I do not have to stop doing my favourite wonderful childish things -- laughing with my girls, wearing false moustaches, talking to fictional people, chasing the cats, dancing in the kitchen -- and I do not have to put on a suit (I could though; suits are hot) and do something Impressive and Businessy and Adult. (I do have to finish applying to Duquesne, and hopefully somehow inherit a lot of money from a forgotten relation, but those are always-plans, and good ones. Well, okay, not the last bit. That is a terrible plan.) Half of my close friends are already out of teenager-hood themselves, and I've never willingly been one who changes to fit a certain illogical standard. And I want to grow up, in the right sort of way -- become a (professional) writer and a librarian, and fall in love, and have children, and homeschool them, and disturb the universe as much as I possibly can.
There's a certain willowy romance about being a teenage girl, though, and I'll miss it. The characters in YA novels will always be younger than me now, even though most of them already have been for a while. I'm passing into a different world, as metaphysical as its boundaries may be. And I like nineteen, that curved, elegantly not-even number; though twenty has a certain mellifluousness of its own (even if it is an even number, and I've never really liked them; they seem smug).
I think I shall finish this pot of tea, and then go to the park for a while to swing on the swings.