I wonder whether you see how very very appealing the ability to run around drinking and shouting and wear daft clothes - the freedom to let yourself do your own thing even if it involves making mistakes - can come across to people struggling with a cocoon of paralysing terror at the thought of doing... anything at all, really.
I see it now. I didn't see it then.
Wonder how easy it would be to get that message through the heads of people at that point in their lives, or whether they'd even believe you.
I was visibly studious at school until I realised that it was a fast-track to being bullied.
I was under sufficiently higher pressures elsewhere that putting up with the bullying was actually the least stressful option.
I could have played the fool, but there's only so far a rapier wit will take you against a forest of cudgels.
It's raw; it's also an eloquent expression of a real state of mind just as valid as any other, and you do yourself an injustice to call it 'angstbollocks' weven if it's a very cool neologism.
I had all these freedoms, and I used them because they were there and they'd never been there before. I was bowled over by the fact that I could go out, and do things, and not have to ask permission. But what I didn't have was any confidence, in my looks or my personality, or -- most of all -- my intelligence.
How are you calibrating confidence here ? I mean, going out and doing stuff, rather than hiding in one's room quivering which was most of my undergraduate years, particularly the first two, seems to me to need a personality trait I would have categorised as confidence - regardless of whether one expects to succeed at it.
Christ. I wanted to cry. I wondered how long it would be before they realised it was all a mistake, and I wasn't up to the standard of the work, and so on.
I still get that, actually, rather a lot of the time.
There are values of "grown-up" I've fought hard against becoming, and others I've had to work on - still am working on - undoing. [ work-related guilt ethics are a large pile of no fun at all. ]
The grown-up-ness thing, for me, is mostly to do with experience rather than behaviour. I feel as though everybody I know started acquiring experience a long time before I did, and was somehow better at acquiring it.
I don't know - I get the feeling from other things you say that there are whole ranges of experiences you were having and mistakes you were making much younger than I was, and catching up on adolescence within the last decade of my life does not seem to have done me any lasting harm.
It's little things, like not being able to find my way around without a map, not being able to sound like a real grown-up on the phone, still being pleased with myself for managing to do things like book flights and hotels, things which most people could quite happily do at 16, so they're liable to laugh at me for still even noticing stuff like that.
Mmmm. I think this conflates rather a lot of different things - being able to find one's way around with out a map, frex, is not something I'd ever think of as age-dependent. And the people stuff inherent in booking flights ands especially hotels - well, I can do it, but my shoulders tense up at the very thought, and I will get someone else to do it if at all possible.
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Date: 2004-10-04 07:58 am (UTC)I see it now. I didn't see it then.
Wonder how easy it would be to get that message through the heads of people at that point in their lives, or whether they'd even believe you.
I was visibly studious at school until I realised that it was a fast-track to being bullied.
I was under sufficiently higher pressures elsewhere that putting up with the bullying was actually the least stressful option.
I could have played the fool, but there's only so far a rapier wit will take you against a forest of cudgels.
Cartoon teenager I HATE YOU
With your lifeless slogans
and your spineless protests,
pretty posters
all the right music
soundtracks each new cliché,
I HATE YOU
A deeper hate than all your
carefully choreographed arguments,
your petty rebellions
can ever show;
your technicolour language says
I HATE YOU
pencilled in, in the speech-bubbles
poised by your two-dimensional face,
badly-drawn,
primary-coloured -
you're just not funny anymore
I HATE YOU
with your well-groomed angst,
your profound pretensions,
your life reduced to
statements in nailvarnish
and eloquent boots and hats
I HATE YOU
I can't look at you anymore
Cartoon teenager,
joke's over.
I'm the artist, I'm gonna
smash the mirror, rub you out.
It's raw; it's also an eloquent expression of a real state of mind just as valid as any other, and you do yourself an injustice to call it 'angstbollocks' weven if it's a very cool neologism.
I had all these freedoms, and I used them because they were there and they'd never been there before. I was bowled over by the fact that I could go out, and do things, and not have to ask permission. But what I didn't have was any confidence, in my looks or my personality, or -- most of all -- my intelligence.
How are you calibrating confidence here ? I mean, going out and doing stuff, rather than hiding in one's room quivering which was most of my undergraduate years, particularly the first two, seems to me to need a personality trait I would have categorised as confidence - regardless of whether one expects to succeed at it.
Christ. I wanted to cry. I wondered how long it would be before they realised it was all a mistake, and I wasn't up to the standard of the work, and so on.
I still get that, actually, rather a lot of the time.
There are values of "grown-up" I've fought hard against becoming, and others I've had to work on - still am working on - undoing. [ work-related guilt ethics are a large pile of no fun at all. ]
The grown-up-ness thing, for me, is mostly to do with experience rather than behaviour. I feel as though everybody I know started acquiring experience a long time before I did, and was somehow better at acquiring it.
I don't know - I get the feeling from other things you say that there are whole ranges of experiences you were having and mistakes you were making much younger than I was, and catching up on adolescence within the last decade of my life does not seem to have done me any lasting harm.
It's little things, like not being able to find my way around without a map, not being able to sound like a real grown-up on the phone, still being pleased with myself for managing to do things like book flights and hotels, things which most people could quite happily do at 16, so they're liable to laugh at me for still even noticing stuff like that.
Mmmm. I think this conflates rather a lot of different things - being able to find one's way around with out a map, frex, is not something I'd ever think of as age-dependent. And the people stuff inherent in booking flights ands especially hotels - well, I can do it, but my shoulders tense up at the very thought, and I will get someone else to do it if at all possible.