Stuff to do when you're a teenager

[instigator_ash]

Had an interesting long chat first with my friends who are brothers, then my brother, then my sister-in-law-who-is-literally-half-my-age-but-has-lots-of-hyphens. Got me to thinking how grateful I am for my older sibling, and how interesting and nice it was to act as the older sibling in turn. Which got me to thinking what kind of advice I would give, had I not been talking about how annoying parents are, and random Earth Science topics, and about high school pranks of legend.

Most of the people on my friends' list are no longer teenagers, which is ok. Some you have children who are not yet teenagers. Maybe this will be useful to you. Feel free to leave comments on other things you think are useful for teenagers to do, whether this advice speaks to you or sounds like a really bad idea, or whatever else.

Advice: Important stuff to do when you're a teenager.


Here are the things that I think it's important that teenagers get done while they're still teenagers. No rush, mind you. People are teenagers for an amazing amount of time. (Some of them forever.) But some of these things, if you don't do them while you're young, you'll miss the chance. I think the list speaks for itself.

Especially when I put an entire paragraph per list item because I like to run at the mouth. Keyboard. Thing.

• Learn about your Parents as People Instead of Parents. A huge part of adolescence (btw. that's from the Latin adol-- ault and esc-- become) is severing that hugely strong influence parents have, where literally everything depends on them, life or death, and turning into a normal, balanced human relationship. This takes a tremendous amount of energy, and I can't think of anyone, at least with a Western background, who doesn't describe it as a struggle or a battle. It haaard. But there are plusses to it, because most people's parents are really interesting people. Even if they're not very good parents (sometimes especially then). While I can't offer advice on that process, what I can offer advice on is that you shouldn't just burn the bridges. Once you've moved past the notion of the parents as the all-powerful, all-good, or all-bad and start to see them as a more nuanced person, which is inevitable because it's both true and obvious, a lot of people don't take the time to go the next step, which is to find out what kind of a more nuanced person they are. One of the most valuable lessons for me was to talk to my parents, my older siblings, and family friends, and learn a lot more about what made my parents the way they are, what goals they had raising me, and what events shaped their world outlooks. It not only helped me understand why they made the choices they made and deal with them more predictably, it also helped me look at those choices and decide if I would make them the same myself. Of particular value, I remember looking at (and being wicked impressed by) my parents' college applications. My mom left her career to raise her children, and though they both are very educated, my mom always played down her academic intelligence. (Being a female schooled in the 50's makes that a habit). She was top of her class in her high school, was awarded numerous academic honors, and still has more degrees than me. That's something that I never would've known if we hadn't gone out and discussed that-- something that is much more important in the context of two people than in the parent-child context.



• Take Yourself Seriously. Now I don't mean don't have fun or enjoy stuff. What I mean is to have the belief that you, as a person, matter to the world. I mean this especially to the girls, because many teenage boys think they're hot shit. (I know I did). But for those of you that don't think that, you do. The enthusiasm that young people coming into politics, learning, industry, sports, and soforth bring with them is amazing and refreshing and invigorating to people around them, and if you lose it is really hard to get back. So hold onto it. Make note of what gets you fired up and keep pursuing it. At the same time, note that the teenage years grant people a lot of power they didn't used to have. Physical power as your growth spurts make you big enough to do real physical work, or potentially to hurt someone. Mental power as the education system kicks into higher gear and gives you a chance to learn something challenging and stretch mental muscles. Sexual power too-- something I'd encourage being extra cautious with. Driving (which is literally a power over life and death). Voting. Some of this power you won't be ready for. Some you can delay, but some you can't. This is a time full of things that really matter a lot, and it's okay to let yourself be awed by those things. They deserve it. It's okay to ask for help if they intimidate you. And if they don't intimidate you, maybe it's a good time to do some research and get yourself intimidated.

• Don't Take Yourself So Seriously. Because of everything above, being a teenager can be scary and overwhelming at times. But while power can be frightening, it can also be a real rush, and while I advise caution, I also say, "seize the day". And in particular, there's no point worrying about smaller, less important things when there's so much bigger and more intense stuff going on. What's smaller? Popularity. Material goods. To an extent, small pieces of academics (though in the big picture, school is the funnel we pour our whole society through before we toss it out into the larger world. Okay, that metaphor was pretty tortured, but it's 12:30am. I can Purple Prose if I want.) Relationships and friendships are important, but we don't necessarily know when we're teenagers what their significance will be later. It's okay to mess up from time to time. Good friendships are durable and will survive hard times. I had a friend who didn't speak to me for an entire year he spent trying to figure out if he belonged in our social group or not. At the end of that year, he came back, and we were still friends, and it was fine.

• Try On Philosophies for Size. One of the great freedoms of being a teenager is no one expects you to be consistent. This is great because it means you can try out different ways of living and see which ones fit. For some people, pretending is enough, through video games, or acting, or writing fiction. For others, they have to try it on for size and see how it works out. Maybe I'll spend six months being vegetarian this year. Maybe I'll spend a year being more religious than I ever was a kid. I think black's an interesting color. How will people react to me if it's the only color I wear? You can just try it. You will get some grief for it-- the teenage world is full of people who want to put you in a bucket and they don't want you climbing back out of it. It makes them uncomfortable. Sucks to be them! You run your life now. Some teenagers choose to make their big chance on going into college, so there's no pressure (because nobody knows what they used to be like) to go back. I would actually argue against this-- the few people I know who really changed themselves going into college changed themselves for the worst, and if your usual support structure isn't there, you may not get the feedback you need to tell you it's not working. Better to try it out in high school, or later on in college once you've got friends there who know you. It's really important to try to figure out the kind of person you want to be while you're a teenager-- when you're a kid, you don't necessarily know the significance of the decisions you make, and as an adult it is much, much harder to change ingrained habits. My own story of change is that I read a comedic play about an extremely relaxed person who was always feeling that he was "in a Los Angeles". I was so taken by the idea that you could simply choose how you felt rather than it being dictate outer events that I devoted a year to just trying to be (inside) a lot more chill. It was really good for me, people around me approved, and I've kept that ever since.

• Finish Something. One thing teenagers have a lot of is free time. You may not realize it, with homework and classes and sleep deprivation, but your schedule is only going to get less flexible as you get older. But at the same time as free time goes down, drive and the ability to focus and ambition are going up. High school and college are great times to pick a project that you enjoy and take it to its conclusion, being that writing a novel-length story, learning a new skill, inventing something, taking up a sport-- anything that you can look back later on and say "I did that" rather than "I was in the middle of doing that". It's a tremendous confidence booster, and the larger world really values the ability to follow through. Often you can work it into your academics, and teachers eat this kind of thing up. (I got two A's out of my English classes out of a story I would've written for myself anyway).