The big secret they never tell you when you are young is that you will never entirely stop being your fifteen year-old self. Sure, you will grow up and away. But there will be moments – small and perhaps infrequent – when you are still exactly who you were, all those years ago.
At fifteen, I exclusively wore tattered hoodies covered in safety pins. My jeans were ripped down the side and pinned or resewn with new fabric. Man we loved safety pins. My hair was long and always up – a messy knot on the top of my head, spilling out from whatever rubberband or hair tie was attempting to corral it. I wore no make up and wouldn’t for years. I, like all teens of the 90′s, was never without headphones and a discman (I’m old!), creating the impression that my life had a soundtrack as eclectic as my heart and thoughts – the Grateful Dead, Tom Waits, Elliot Smith, Sublime, Fugazi, John Lee Hooker, and Joan Baez all streamed through my nights and days, seamlessly bleeding into one another as if there were nothing odd happening at all. I read voraciously, a dog-eared book weighing down my back pocket or tucked in my sweatshirt. I was an idealist – such an idealist – and would fight passionately for the things I believed in.
At 15, I was also deeply insecure. But more importantly, had not yet learned it was okay to say that. My best friends were beautiful – stunning, really – and I felt very aware of our differences. I was the one who was funny – buddies with the guys, all of whom would come to me to talk about their crushes. I was not those things for them and I knew it. I felt too ashamed to admit that it bothered me – like it meant I was abandoning feminism and independence to have a crush myself. And I suppose I was probably afraid – to admit a crush is to open one’s self to rejection and that was so terribly frightening to me. I felt very alone in the world – abandoned and not quite worth sticking around for. I was passionate about what I thought was right and wrong in the world – just fiery mad at injustice and always ready to go to the mat about it – but at the same time so conflict averse it would cause me intense anxiety when people yelled at one another. I was painfully shy but did not always appear to be so and, because I had no frame-work to articulate that idea, I thought I was broken.
Basically, I was your typical 15 year-old hot mess.
When I was younger, I thought being grown meant not feeling those things anymore. It meant having your shit together in some substantial way – being able to walk into a room and not feel out of place and like you had accidentally wandered into a conference room in your mom’s office. I thought when I was older, I would always: Always feel secure, always feel confident, always know what I was doing.
It has been a great shock, my friends, to learn that is not the case. I spent a lot of my twenties waiting for the moment – the magic moment – when it was all going to click and I was going to feel like a real adult.
It hasn’t exactly happened yet.
And I’m not sure it is ever going to.
We do grow up and away from our uncertainties, but not in the way we thought we would. It is not definitive and clear the way I once imagined it would be – like someday I would get up, put on a dress and heels, go to work, and not feel a little like an imposter or like I would never feel those insecurities of being in the shadow of my beautiful friends or like I would never wonder where precisely I fit in the world. Instead it is slow – we grow into our new, older selves slowly, day by day, and without ever really seeing it at the time. But then we look up, at some point, and notice we aren’t who we used to be. Perhaps we are more cautious – we no longer jog at midnight or drive quite so fast. We actually subscribe to the newspaper instead of stealing it from the neighbor. The coffee-to-milk ratio slowly shifts from 40/60 to 95/5. We stumble to a place where we possess our own bodies with a confidence we did not have in our younger years. We only understand slang about 70% of the time.
But, for all that, sometimes I don’t feel grown at all. Sometimes, usually in brief passing moments, I feel exactly the way I did at 15 – scared, trying to act braver than I was, uncertain I was wanted or want-able, rebellious, idealistic, and messy. Just a hot mess.
And that is what they don’t tell you when you are younger. That the world will not come together perfectly, in a magical moment, when suddenly you become an adult and never worry about whether your hair looks funny or if a boy likes you or if you are good enough. They don’t tell you that you will still be you, long after you take the safety pins out of your clothes and figure out how to win the war against your hair. But what they really don’t tell you is that it is okay – better even – that you aren’t grown in the way you once imagined you would be. That you still laugh at really bad jokes and blush at crushes and sometimes feel shaky and sad. That those things – messy and small – are not signs of your youth, but signs of your humanity. And we shouldn’t lose them. We should grow into understanding them, sure. But not away from experiencing them.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. But at least you got to read some Shel Silverstein poems, eh?
