a note on growing up
May. 9th, 2019 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peppercatvia http://bit.ly/2YivB2A
fozmeadows:
I’m starting to lose patience with how the purity/anti movement fails to recognise that, by definition, every adult has the lived experience of having been a teenager at some point, as opposed to just being some weird, separate class of person who exists completely beyond the Realm of Youth. Yes, there is a relevant distinction to be made between people who grew up at different times, under different cultural auspices, and how their varying experiences contributed to both their development then and their beliefs now, but at the same time, the idea that only current and/or extremely recent teenagers are qualified to talk about teenage anything is Deeply Unhelpful, not least because it means continually reinventing the discourse wheel. If your entire intellectual position is that it’s fundamentally bad or wrong for adults to socialise, morally disagree with or otherwise debate teenagers, then you’ve essentially committed to the idea that growing as a person - that growing up, even - invalidates whatever Youthful Knowledge you once possessed, while simultaneously deeming it creepy if said grown-ups continue to profess any interest in youth culture.
A personal observation: in my tweens and teens, it felt like becoming an adult was this weird, almost brainwashy switch-flip whereby you suddenly woke up one morning and Knew You Were An Adult, as though your subconscious had downloaded a hardware upgrade during the night - and part of what enabled that belief is how little time I spent around non-family, non-teacher adults until I was one. Our society now is weirdly age-segregated, as I’ve had occasion to note before, and any kind of segregation tends to distort our perception of whichever groups we see only at a distance. I understand why there are teenagers in the world and online who think it’s weird that some adults like the same stuff they do, or enjoy stories with teenagers in them, and I also understand that creepy adults do exist - but the Venn diagram of overlap between those categories is very far from being a perfect circle.
Here’s the truth: you don’t wake up one morning and suddenly Become An Adult Forever. You just keep getting better at being yourself, day after day, which means lots of small changes over time - some of them obvious, some of them not, all happening at different rates in response to different stimuli - while your brain chemistry finds an equilibrium, or at least a relative normal, and the novelty of new autonomy is counterbalanced by the addition of new responsibilities. And at some point, you have the realisation that the Adult Switch is never going to flip: that it always was and always will be just you, forever, doing the same sort of mental and emotional self-improvement that took you from scrawled backwards letters in kindergarten to writing essays in middle school, only without a Well Done! sticker or a letter grade to reward you, and without a shared framework of educational tests and milestones to give the illusion of a universal developmental trajectory with the people you see each day, who now vary vastly in age.
Because really, the way you develop is never universal - hell, it’s not even necessarily linear. I learned to read at three and never stopped; my husband, now a university professor, didn’t read a full book by himself until he was ten. You forget skills throughout your life and have to relearn them; some things you learn to do differently than others. Kids who grow up watching their parents fight in an unhappy marriage can know more about heartbreak at twelve than many well-adjusted adults, but the same is also true of the adult version of that kid, reaching out to someone younger who they recognise as going through the same issues. The idea that teenagers are fluid and developing, whereas adults are static and already know themselves forever, and can therefore have no non-creepy reason for talking to teens or enjoying youth culture, is wrong on every level.
It is healthy for people to interact with people of all ages - quite literally, it connects us to our shared humanity. Those heartwarming, “surprise, this worked!” articles you see every so often, about how giving students rooms in a retirement community or putting a kindergarten in an old age home was a net boon to everyone involved shouldn’t shock us, because that’s how people are meant to live. The fact that we’ve built our current educational model around separating students by age isn’t some fundamental expression of How People Are - it’s an historical anomaly with a slew of toxic behavioural, cultural and emotional consequences.
I am not saying that every teenage fan needs to go out and befriend adult fans, or even feel comfortable with the idea of doing so. As I said, everyone develops at different rates! But there is a big, honking difference between saying, “I am sixteen and don’t feel comfortable being friendly with adults,” and “I am sixteen and don’t feel comfortable being friendly with adults, so therefore any other teenager who does is a naive victim of creepy behaviour,” and I would rather not see them conflated.
All of this.
(I miss those grades and shared frameworks. They weren’t the nicest bits, but they were certainly easy and reliable. Still: the stratification was ultimately pretty useless.)
fozmeadows:
I’m starting to lose patience with how the purity/anti movement fails to recognise that, by definition, every adult has the lived experience of having been a teenager at some point, as opposed to just being some weird, separate class of person who exists completely beyond the Realm of Youth. Yes, there is a relevant distinction to be made between people who grew up at different times, under different cultural auspices, and how their varying experiences contributed to both their development then and their beliefs now, but at the same time, the idea that only current and/or extremely recent teenagers are qualified to talk about teenage anything is Deeply Unhelpful, not least because it means continually reinventing the discourse wheel. If your entire intellectual position is that it’s fundamentally bad or wrong for adults to socialise, morally disagree with or otherwise debate teenagers, then you’ve essentially committed to the idea that growing as a person - that growing up, even - invalidates whatever Youthful Knowledge you once possessed, while simultaneously deeming it creepy if said grown-ups continue to profess any interest in youth culture.
A personal observation: in my tweens and teens, it felt like becoming an adult was this weird, almost brainwashy switch-flip whereby you suddenly woke up one morning and Knew You Were An Adult, as though your subconscious had downloaded a hardware upgrade during the night - and part of what enabled that belief is how little time I spent around non-family, non-teacher adults until I was one. Our society now is weirdly age-segregated, as I’ve had occasion to note before, and any kind of segregation tends to distort our perception of whichever groups we see only at a distance. I understand why there are teenagers in the world and online who think it’s weird that some adults like the same stuff they do, or enjoy stories with teenagers in them, and I also understand that creepy adults do exist - but the Venn diagram of overlap between those categories is very far from being a perfect circle.
Here’s the truth: you don’t wake up one morning and suddenly Become An Adult Forever. You just keep getting better at being yourself, day after day, which means lots of small changes over time - some of them obvious, some of them not, all happening at different rates in response to different stimuli - while your brain chemistry finds an equilibrium, or at least a relative normal, and the novelty of new autonomy is counterbalanced by the addition of new responsibilities. And at some point, you have the realisation that the Adult Switch is never going to flip: that it always was and always will be just you, forever, doing the same sort of mental and emotional self-improvement that took you from scrawled backwards letters in kindergarten to writing essays in middle school, only without a Well Done! sticker or a letter grade to reward you, and without a shared framework of educational tests and milestones to give the illusion of a universal developmental trajectory with the people you see each day, who now vary vastly in age.
Because really, the way you develop is never universal - hell, it’s not even necessarily linear. I learned to read at three and never stopped; my husband, now a university professor, didn’t read a full book by himself until he was ten. You forget skills throughout your life and have to relearn them; some things you learn to do differently than others. Kids who grow up watching their parents fight in an unhappy marriage can know more about heartbreak at twelve than many well-adjusted adults, but the same is also true of the adult version of that kid, reaching out to someone younger who they recognise as going through the same issues. The idea that teenagers are fluid and developing, whereas adults are static and already know themselves forever, and can therefore have no non-creepy reason for talking to teens or enjoying youth culture, is wrong on every level.
It is healthy for people to interact with people of all ages - quite literally, it connects us to our shared humanity. Those heartwarming, “surprise, this worked!” articles you see every so often, about how giving students rooms in a retirement community or putting a kindergarten in an old age home was a net boon to everyone involved shouldn’t shock us, because that’s how people are meant to live. The fact that we’ve built our current educational model around separating students by age isn’t some fundamental expression of How People Are - it’s an historical anomaly with a slew of toxic behavioural, cultural and emotional consequences.
I am not saying that every teenage fan needs to go out and befriend adult fans, or even feel comfortable with the idea of doing so. As I said, everyone develops at different rates! But there is a big, honking difference between saying, “I am sixteen and don’t feel comfortable being friendly with adults,” and “I am sixteen and don’t feel comfortable being friendly with adults, so therefore any other teenager who does is a naive victim of creepy behaviour,” and I would rather not see them conflated.
All of this.
(I miss those grades and shared frameworks. They weren’t the nicest bits, but they were certainly easy and reliable. Still: the stratification was ultimately pretty useless.)
