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Teenage Trauma

  
 
The Falcon
22:56 / 20.10.03
It's quite a good idea, I think. I want to write a slightly fantastical, allegorical comic about teenagers in their late teens, and I want you to help.

Anyway, form dictates I have to go first, I suppose: When I was 17, and she was 18, in the year above, I kissed (the girl who I thought was) the most beautiful girl in the school. She then didn't speak to me for several months. I still don't know why, even though we speak occasionally now. In retrospect, I don't think I can be said to have loved her, but I thought I did (intensely, as teenagers do) for a long time.

Anyway, that was kind-of excruciating, and if you've got anything else to offer (doesn't have to be about 'being in love') or if you are a teen in the now - and my intended audience, that'd be nice.

In the unlikely event I do ever get the thing made, I promise all credit where due, and if not - well, it's a charming, anonymous(ish) confessional.
 
 
bitchiekittie
23:14 / 20.10.03
you want funny, serious, dramatic, over the top, stupid? or any and all of the above? and do you want detail, or just the basic facts of the situation?
 
 
The Falcon
00:31 / 21.10.03
Anything that's pretty intense, basically.

Other than that, whatever you fancy. Done however you fancy.
 
 
bio k9
01:58 / 21.10.03
Tell him why they call you "fingercuffs".
 
 
Persephone
02:34 / 21.10.03
Here, you can have this one:

So when I was a sophomore in high school, not nearly as ugly as I had been freshman year but not quite as gorgeous as I was going to be junior year, I had a crush on a boy. God knows why. He was entirely stupid. We did end up going out junior year, and I had the pleasure of dumping him. But this was before that.

This was the year that Jenny and Greg were together on All My Children, and Jenny knitted Greg this scarf for Christmas? I know how to knit, you know. I can knit really fast. My mother taught me when I was, like, seven. But this was because we were poor; it was in the same category as having her make clothes for me and my sisters. The only person who got bought clothes in our family was Dad, but that's a different story. So I wasn't going to make this boy a scarf with my hands. I bought him a scarf, and I gave it to him. And he said that he had a present for me, but it was at home. Which was a lie, of course.

Right before school let out for Christmas break, he rather proudly handed me my present. It was either not wrapped or very poorly wrapped; and when I saw what it was, it was like being bitten by a snake. It was a plastic E.T. doll! It had a retractable neck. It was absolutely shocking in its ugliness. This was a present that said, This is you.

I stuffed it in a trash can & piled trash over it.

I already used this in a monologue, but only about a hundred people saw it & it was three years ago, so they've all forgotten it. The funny thing is, I had to get that same E.T. doll to use as a prop for my monologue. And if you ever have to find a weird toy, you want to try Uncle Fun's on Belmont; they had it in two different sizes. So it's back in my life, sitting on the mantel and sort of presiding over the other lost and broken toys.
 
 
grant
18:35 / 21.10.03
Any scenario that leads to you trying to zip up your pants while saying, "Oh, gee, Mom, uh, I didn't expect you home so soon."

Didn't happen to me until I was a slacker in my 20s, but that was the 1990s for you. At least in that case, I was not alone at the time. I've heard from others who were.

I've blocked most of my teen years from my memory, but seem to recall lots of teasing in swim team and in the school's locker rooms -- nudity and near-nudity being a great access to trauma.
 
 
Cat Chant
20:00 / 21.10.03
Being 16. Standing on the tiny, triangular lawn outside the 1960s-built boarding house tucked between two ancient crumbling piles of grandeur-type boarding houses (the one on the right was called Meister Omers, I forget what the one on the left was called) in the precinct of Canterbury Cathedral. Everywhere were posh girls with that long, straight, shiny hair and no makeup that posh girls have, shouting in posh-girl voices and being called things like Fizzy and all wearing lambswool V-neck jumpers in shades of navy blue and bottle green. I don't remember them, though, I just know they must have been there because for the next two years they were always there.

Watching my fabulous butch mother, who had spent the last ten minutes going off to buy me coat-hangers because there weren't enough in the dorm and because she has to do things when she's sad, striding away, and knowing she was close to tears but being too full of tears myself to be able to acknowledge it. Swallowing the tears. And when she was out of sight, everything suddenly being different, and realizing/finding out I was really going to be 3,500 miles away from my parents & brother for the next two years... I can't quite put it into words. Suddenly being in a situation I had no resources for, no history, no knowledge of the context...

(On the plus side, I lost about 5-10 kilos in my first couple of months at that school: it was the first time I was ever physically too unhappy to eat, which even at the time I found quite an interesting sensation [Ooh! So that's what it's like when people in books say they can't eat for the lump in their throat!])
 
 
Cat Chant
20:03 / 21.10.03
Suddenly being among people called Fizzy to whom it made sense that their rugby-playing boyfriends were loyal to a school house called Meister Omers actually might sum up the weirdness of it well enough.
 
 
gingerbop
22:56 / 21.10.03
Things that I've considered as trauma all seem lame, compared to friends who's parents have died in their teens and suchlike. But here are a couple of my traumas:

When I was 12, I majorly fell for this guy, Dave. I couldnt tell why, although I loved how safe I felt in his arms, whether he as hugging me, or whether (as on one occasion) he was using me as a human shield so him friend wouldnt throw rocks at him. (he did anway).

It might just be crazy teenage thinking being in love-ness, but I think it was love. 2 years later, it finally looked like we'd be getting together. Then he left school. Then he joined the army. Every so often, he'd come back, and tell me he loved me and all this shite, and because I wanted to, I somehow believed it. But then he'd just leave again. This happened probably about 6 times, and every time, afterwards I just feel like nobody would ever want me again, because I was so stupid to be dragged along with him, time and again.

At the end of last year, we did get together. On the whole, I was overjoyed, but always had the niggling doubt he'd do the same. But I was just so happy to be with him...

So at new year, I went over to his, and all related shinanigans. I didnt hear from him again. Which I wasnt best pleased with, after the "I love you so much"es of the last month. Then there was the war in Iraq, and every time the news came on, I'd almost be in tears, wondering "what if..?" Once at gymnastics, a friend of his brothers told me he though something had happened to him, and I broke down in tears in front of 70 people.
And when he finally got home, he texted me asking for animalistic sex. I told him to ram it up his arse, and it was such a fucking relief.

So I'd pretty much got over him, and I'd gone camping, and I'd got together with a different guy called Dave, a really fucking decent guy, who was funny and sweet and nice.
And he died 10 days later.

I felt like I could never be happy again, and I kept going over the pettiness of what I was worrying about, when he was lieing, dying on a road. I was getting stressed with sports centre staff for putting equipment up wrong. I mean, who fucking cares? Nothing mattered anymore, except that there was this hole in the world, and a hole in the ground. I could have been over to his house, offered him a lift to work, he'd still be here. If only I'd gone to visit him in his shop, at least, the day before. But I was preoccupied with a girl, who I didnt even like that much. And remembering when we were camping; if only i'd held him closer... and now I cant ever have it back.
The funeral: Thinking of how close I was to what was now in a box, passing my shoulder, then being buried. It was awful.

Since then, nothing has really felt that bad. At least Im still living.
 
 
The Falcon
14:03 / 22.10.03
These are great, thanks.

That's far more distressing than most things I can think of to happen to teenage kids, Bop. This m.s. kid in a wheelchair in my registration class died when I was in High School, but he wasn't really my friend.
 
 
Spaniel
14:52 / 22.10.03
A series of brief sketches.

1. So then, I'm 16 and charged with keeping control at a hormone fuelled teenage gathering, by none other than Star's (yes, that's right, I had a girlfriend called Star) mother and 27 year old cousin. There was to be no booze, no vandalism - Star's mum liked her enormous pink house just the way it was, thanyew - and no sex.
Imagine my horror when the cousin came back early to find a horde of drunken children engaged in various sexual activities. Not to mention the fact that she walked in on Star and I mid-thrust.

Her boyfriend provided the only light relief:

Boyfriend (from outside the door):"Are they shagging?"
Cousin: "Yes!"
Boyfriend (shoving bottle of beer triumphantly into the room): "WAYHEY!"

Er...

2. Runce and I getting rumbled for sciving (sp) off school. We'd spent weeks guiltily ducking into fields, hiding out at friends' houses and forging sick-notes, only to find our activities had been comprehensively tracked and catalogued by our head of year. Needless to say, our mum was utterly mortified, we were grounded for weeks, placed in perpetual detention at school, routinely shouted at and harassed, and to top it all, my treacherous absent father saw fit to reveal my dope smoking antics to all and sundry.
The last time I had been to his house he had offered me a spliff for fucks sake!
Christ, I didn't even enjoy my time away from school, fuelled, as it was, by self fulfilling paranoia.

There's more...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
16:14 / 22.10.03
Another heavy one, but I'm in the mood to talk about it these days...

My mother was diagnosed manic-depressive(very seriously), and was in and out of hospital throughout my early teens.

When she was an in-patient, we'd visit her at least once a week.

I *hated* it.

I never wanted to go, and early on used to try to refuse to/fantasise accidents etc. We'd never know if she'd recognise us or not, and even in her more lucid periods she was either furiously angry or fearful and crying. Begging/screaming at my dad to take us 'home' to India.

I was terrifed that he might accede to this, and I'd be taken away from my friends and dumped in some Indian private school.

Otherwise we'd try and talk to her(or rather, my dad and older sister would, i'd skulk in a corner) and she'd not know who we/she was, or she'd be lost somewhere in her memories... or practically catatonic.

Alot of that period is blanked out, but i can remember standing in the corner of her hospital room, trying to get as far away as possible/looking out of the window, wanting to be anywhere but where I was.

When I was 14, she disappeared one day. Can't remember how many days it was, I think three or four later, that the police arrived to tell us they'd found her body, washed up on Brighton beach.

Went to school next day to discover that *everyone* had been told what had happened.

It was like living in an invisible cell, I've described it as 'the grief bubble', walking around with a kind of silencing force-field surround you. Weeks of barely anyone speaking to me, (people didn't know what to say so said nothing.) people staring, but looking away when i met their eyes, whispering about me....

It's a really vivid memory, that bubble.

It was awful. And in retrospect, i can see that early teenage years are a terrible time to have to deal with all of that, they're scary/ground is shifting enough as it is.

Bop, you're very brave, hugs hon. and you're right. life does go on.(that's not meant to be pat or patronising, it's just my experience.)
 
 
gingerbop
20:38 / 22.10.03
God, BiP, thats awful.
*cries*
 
 
Olulabelle
10:06 / 23.10.03
*Echoes Gingerbop*

Sort of similarly, but not nearly as tragically, my Mum had severe depression throughout my childhood and tried to commit suicide so many times it became horrifyingly routine. I recall being about 15 when I got a phone call from the hospital telling me my Mum had tried to do it again, and I said really matter-of-factly "OK, well let me just finish my dinner and I'll be over."

Duncan, I have a little teen trauma about Valentines cards which you are welcome to if you like.

At age 13 I sent my first boyfriend a Valentines card. We had been going out for almost a year, and I was dedicated to him, although he was a bit of a tart. So anyway, I took great care with his card, making it really elegant with a drawing on the front and writing a poem inside. He, in return, gave me a 80's style metre-high satin padded card, with a 'cute' teddy bear on it.

You may think that in itself is the trauma, but I didn't take issue over his lack of style. What really upset me was that inside he had tippexed out another girls name, and WRITTEN MINE OVER IT INSTEAD.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
10:37 / 23.10.03
Walking up to the front door of the house and putting my key in the lock and the door opening before I'd quite managed to turn the key and the look on my parent's faces and knowing that my grandfather (dziadek) had died and I just started howling with laughter. And my dad saying 'I'm so pleased you laughed' a minute later and I think, though I've never asked, that he laughed too earlier that day and then later my brother saying 'no, no...' as he walked in to the house and also realised before anyone said a word. I remember sitting at the bottom of the second flight of stairs on the landing, looking after my mum as she cried for hours.

A few weeks earlier coming back from France on a minibus and my brother telling me my nan had died over the phone. Everyone cried at that funeral, a stark contrast to my dziadek's full of tight lipped Polish people who cared in a different way. They had all been through too much to cry at a death from old age.

Two years before, the morning that I wasn't going to visit my granny (babcia) in the hospital as she lay dying from pneumonia and her stroke because she'd had alzheimers for 15 years and it was killing her. I changed my mind and told my mother to go to the hospital, a sudden flash of need in my head, 45 minutes later walking in to the ward and realising hospitals weren't so bad and then it turned out she was dead. Stepping just inside the curtain her body was rigid, her arms slightly claw like in the air and her mouth was open and my babcia wasn't there anymore. I laughed then as well but it was relief, I was so glad she wasn't dying anymore because the months before that were appalling. The nurse gave me the dirtiest look and I think she just didn't get how glad I was and my mother made me swear that if she ever got alzheimers I'd fight for euthanasia (and I would).
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
19:44 / 23.10.03
kinda half mine and half a friend's:

there was this boy. I *really* liked him(was a v.shy and naive 16-year-old when it came to the whole, er, boys, er, thing... *g* )

nerved myself up to 'ask him out'. chickened out about five times. (lots of aborted 'accidentally' bumping into him moves. smoooooth )

Unburdened myself endlessly to a simiarly shy/nervous friend. Finally got another friend of ours to do it for me.

He said no, of course.

What makes it extra cringy is yes, you've guessed it, unbeknownst to me, friend a was madly in love with him. And the 'asker' told her first.

And unbeknownst to either of us, he was pretty keen on her.

But was too shy to do anything about it.

  
  
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