My 13 Year-Old Self

I have a theory that even though we grow up - and for some, that's obviously more a physical process than it is an emotional one - we still carry around with us to some degree little versions of ourselves at all of the ages that we've attained prior to our current one.  If I'm riding down the road and hear the opening strains of "Footloose," my 18 year-old self pops out and starts DWD. . . dancing while driving. :-)  When I ride by the site of the old Thomson City Pool, my 9 year-old self pines for the place where I first took swimming lessons and spent summer afternoons with neighborhood friends.  (If you've read Time and Tide, this shouldn't surprise you.  And really. . . if you haven't, why haven't you by now? :-))  And despite the fact that my single days are long behind me, hearing about anybody's bad and self-esteem wrecking breakup evokes my 26 year-old self and a particularly bad heartbreak that I went through that year - and although it didn't take long for me to be thankful that that particular relationship didn't work out, epiphanies don't necessarily keep one's heart from hurting.

Of course, some people carry around locket-sized versions of their former selves. . . others carry around life-sized portraits, and those large-as-life entities can get them into trouble.  It's one thing to remember being picked last for basically every sports team in middle school P. E. and being a glaringly late bloomer throughout those years, probably largely because you were a year younger than your classmates and went through that serious adolescent awkwardness more or less by yourself, and letting those memories make you compassionate toward others who have gone through/are going through the same thing.  It's another thing altogether to let those memories still shape your view of who you are thirty or forty years later.  And if you were a golden child/star athlete/belle of the ball kid during your middle and high school years who keeps wanting to live in that part of your life. . . cue up Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days," do some self-examination, and LET IT GO already!  (My apologies to those of you who now have Idina Menzel singing in your heads.)

Okay. . . so if I'm not dwelling on one of my former selves, why am I waxing so philosophical about them?  Well, I probably do revisit my teenage years more than does the average person of my age simply because other than for the five years that I was a full-time undergraduate and graduate student, I've never really left high school. They've just paid me to go for about three decades now, and I'm a lot less worried about what those in grades 9-12 think about me now than I was then.  (In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I would have considered "cool" a compliment. . . now when I hear it applied to me, and I do occasionally, I worry that I'm not acting professional or mature enough.)  If I ever stop being able to step into the shoes of my students and attempting to see the world from their points of view, I will have lost what I consider to be probably the greatest strength that I've had as a teacher throughout my career.

However, what's made me think about all of this a bit more over the past few days is a Timehop post I shared a few days ago, one that included my ninth grade school picture (see above).  Let me give you some context about that picture.  For starters, I had turned 13 just weeks before it was taken; yes, that means that I was a young ninth grader.  (Actually, I was 12 for the first five days of my freshman year. . . I turned 13 that Saturday.)  I won't go into all of the gory details, but I started first grade just after I turned 5, graduated from high school when I was 16 (turned 17 that August), graduated from college when I was 20 (turned 21 that August), and received my first graduate degree when I was 22 (turned 23 that August).  Personally, I did a lot of things late (ride a bike, get married, have babies). . . academically, I did things early (including learning to read when I was 3).  And as you may have gathered from some of my comments above, my middle school years were NOT the best years of my life.  I managed to skip the acne phase (well, not skip exactly. . . it hit when I was about 19), but most of the other things that could have made that time in my life awkward were in place.  I was short, uncoordinated, a good student at a time in life that being a good student wasn't going to win you status points (translation: a nerd). . . you get the picture.  I didn't know what to do with my fine, straight hair. . . my feeble attempts just left it looking flat and sometimes over-conditioned. Although the academic part of school was great, the social part of it wasn't - and although I don't remember cheering on the last day of eighth grade, I probably should have.

I can share all of this matter-of-factly now, but it was still very real and raw at the beginning of my ninth grade year.   The "picking" that I went through during middle school didn't go away just because we moved on to high school; in fact, it didn't stop until I stopped ignoring it and yelled at one of the boys who was doing it one day that I was sick of being the butt of his jokes and that he needed to stop.  (If you know me now, the concept of my getting in someone's face and standing up for what I feel isn't so strange; for me at 13, it was a TOTALLY different story and apparently made enough of an impression that the behavior did stop that day.)  I had made some physical changes that summer.  I got a perm (hence, the life that you see in my hair in this picture), and my mother took me to Merle Norman to learn how to do make up - and she actually allowed me to start wearing it.  I also finally passed the 5 feet mark and started looking a bit more like the adult I would become someday than I did the little girl that I was leaving behind.  Still, on the inside, things hadn't changed a lot - and socially among my peers, things hadn't changed a lot, either.  Again, I was confident in my academic ability - in everything else, particularly in my looks, not so much.

Now that you have your context, let's talk about the Timehop post.  One of my Facebook friends to whom I had given the picture way back in 1978 had scanned and shared the photo five years earlier, and I shared it on a whim when it showed up on Timehop this past Saturday.  Quite honestly, I didn't expect anyone to pay any attention to it.  (If that sounds self-deprecating, I don't mean for it to. . . I just didn't see anything particularly noteworthy about that old picture.)

So. . . I was surprised when it started picking up likes.  Lots of them.  By the time all was said and done, 71 of them.  To get 71 likes, I generally have to buy a new car, change jobs, or announce that I'm pregnant.

Over the past few days, I've thought about how much good those likes would have done my 13 year-old self when I actually was 13.  (For the record, the one who still lives inside me feels pretty warm and fuzzy about them.)  More importantly than how my inner early teen feels about it now, though, I think there's a message in here for those who are experiencing now what I experienced (gulp!) 36 years ago.  (I don't know why that shocks me. . . it constantly occurs to me that I'm closer to the ages of the grandmothers of some of my students than I am to the ages of their mothers.)  Understandably, teenagers often have tunnel vision, and life is all about the here and now.  Here and now, people don't like how I look.  Here and now, no one is asking me out.  Here and now, I'd never think of submitting my name for the homecoming ballot because I'd never make the final cut.  Here and now, I just don't fit in.  Here and now, people have sized me up and classified me. . . and while I can probably do some things to move down the social pecking order, I can do next to nothing to move up it.

But you know what?  "Here and now" doesn't last nearly as long as you think it will - and the face that you're pretty sure no one is noticing right now may get 71 likes on a social network site when you're older and when peer approval has long since ceased to be a big deal.  The quirky sense of humor that people don't get - or necessarily want - now may strike a chord with people once you and they have grown up.  Once you leave P. E. behind, you may learn to laugh at your complete lack of coordination, and others may find it sort of endearing.  Above all, when you reach that place in life that the approval of others is much less important (and it does get easier as you get older - or at least it should) and you learn to love that quirky, uncoordinated, compassionate, loving, brilliant in whatever way God has gifted you mess that is you, all of those things that eat at you will become a lot less hungry.  When you're 13 and the idiot who sits behind you in English is telling you that X wants to go with you just so that he can make a big joke out of you, you can't see that.  (Yelling at him may make you feel better, though - and it might even make him see that he's being cruel and hurtful, which may shut him and his friends up for good.)  However, if you can make it through those years and those hurts - and realize that they truly DON'T  go on forever - you can look back at them with compassion and empathy toward your 13 year-old self and let them shape you into one who is compassionate and empathetic toward others.  But as for their ability to make you think less of yourself and your potential to live your life imagined. . . you can look at them as a fact that was and not as a feeling that is.

To everyone who liked that picture, my 13 year-old self thanks you.  To those who openly complimented it, she really thanks you. :-)  And to everyone who needs the reminder. . . don't let the slanted view that your here and now is doing to your perception of the world make you think less of yourself.  Just because you're not seeing at the moment the beauty (and I don't necessarily mean physical beauty) in who God made you to be doesn't mean that it isn't there.