Teenage Presumption

This is for the teenagers. For the middle schoolers. For the high schoolers. For the young adults.

Even though it was a few decades ago now, I can go back to the feeling of teenage-ness.

When I re-create my teenage self, I can taste the soup of feelings. It’s palatable, palpable and very complex.

For me, It felt mousy. It felt vulnerable. If felt fragile and impressionable. If felt shy. It felt contracted. It felt flip flopsy. It felt tired. It felt VERY awkward.

It also felt excited. If felt ready. If felt energetic. It felt beautiful. If felt hopeful. If felt dreamy.

It felt naive…I’ve always loved “naive”.

I moved to Florida in 10th grade. I was coming from a public art school in Ottawa, where black trench coats were hot and my black hair dye was so black that the box called it “blue black” and my ghostly white skin was made whiter with foundation 2 shades lighter than it should have been and my english as a second language was bare bones, fractured and didn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

We moved to Fort Lauderdale where I found myself at a private school a few blocks from the beach, where the girls were blond debutantes, the boys were letterman jacket wearing football players and they not only drove cars to school but they drove fancy cars to school. The school uniform skirts were short, everyone had a tan, a manicure, gold shoes and it felt like they all smelled like coconut or bubble gum.

I was an alien. I hid. I became invisible. Showing up as myself wasn’t an option. This was self preservation. At least I thought it was.

Months went by where I had nothing else to do but go to school and hightail it out of there the moment the bell rang.

I spent hours and hours, day in and day out walking on the beach, trying to understand how and why I ended up “here”. It felt like a joke except it wasn’t funny. It was in these moments alone that I could breathe. The walking, the sun on my skin and the foreign smell of the ocean were salty enough to expose my emotional wounds and therapeutic enough to let themselves be expressed.

Somewhere around the three month mark, I made a decision. I realized that nobody was coming to save me. I realized that I would either keep curling up into a ball, under my shell of inadequacies until I was so contracted that I could no longer look up or I would need to tap into any ounce of trust I could find in my gut and in my heart to go for it and live my life despite how scary it was and despite the fact that I had no clue what I was doing.

In the picosecond that I realized I had a choice. Everything changed. Everything changed because the realization that there was a choice flipped a switch that couldn’t be unflipped. It still took months to find a tribe that I could relate to. I still had a ridiculous accent when I spoke english. I still was trying to figure out what a debutante was, what pep rallies were all about, that people used words like “dude” and “rad” and I never would get use to the disgusting flying cock roaches of Florida called palmetto bugs (gross). BUT…my perspective had changed and I knew that If I pretended it hadn’t, I’d be invalidating the reality and the truth to myself about myself.

Unlike with apathy and indifference, there’s a lot of energy in anger. We can use it to take action to move us into courage. It’s ok to get pissed. There’s a healthy purpose purpose to anger BUT, if we stay pissed, if we live there too long, it takes hold and becomes a part of us.

We’ve all experienced injustices. Some certainly more than others. We have to sort through the density to separate the perceived injustices and the actual injustices. Once we have our pile of legit injustices, we have to ask ourselves if injustice collecting is serving us. We have to watch our backs here because we’re every corner of our culture is teaching us to become injustice collectors. Our politicians. Mainstream media. Social media. Even, to some extend…our organized religions.

Apparently the only way to free ourselves of the negative feelings that come and to make real change and to have true power is to change our perspectives. Mother Theresa said no to every “anti war” protests but said yes to every “peace” rally. I worry that maybe we’re inadvertently recognizing our kids for expressing what they don’t like about themselves.

Fall in love with life. If you can’t yet fall in love with yourself, try falling in love with everything around you. Try to become excited about everything. Become excited about your breakfast sandwich, about your ride to school, about your bed, about any and all time you spend outside.

This isn’t about pain. It’s about your life and how you want to live.

The spark of our aliveness is getting snuffed. And all we do is talk about the process by which it’s getting snufffed instead of identifying the why. The problem is that the why can’t be found outside of us…we must change our perspective.

We’re being taught suppress and repress our positive feelings. How about we stop downplaying our happiness? Our happiness is the greatest gift that we can give humanity. Why can’t we show others how excited we are about anything and everything? We debase our happiness under the guise of “fitting in”. Somehow, we’re being taught to do this. Every time we do this though, we lose love for ourselves and everyone else.

Pain can become addictive, it can become pleasurable. Let’s be cautious of our willingness to believe negative things about ourselves.