Regress
This weekend I read the short novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I quite enjoyed. I agree with the critics that it's not a Great Book, but it is indeed a Good Book, and I think the people who attempt to relegate it to young adult reader status must have missed out on a lot of what it offers to adults. In much the same way that Catcher in the Rye was an entirely different book when I read it for class as a college senior than when I read it in 8th grade for pleasure, this one has many messages to bear.
One thing it started me to thinking about was my own junior high experience. While it's true that the book's main character was a high school freshman, people mature at all different rates, and different aspects of their maturity also progress at different rates: physical development, emotional maturity, psychological complexity, sexual experience, experimentation with alcohol or drugs or smoking — lots of different things going on in those _-teen years. For a number of reasons, a lot of the feelings Charlie was experiencing I equated more closely with 7th, rather than 9th, grade (though many of his actually experiences I didn't run into until late high school — again that different rates thing).
Regardless, when I was a kid, I was all over the map, so to speak. My parents used to joke that I was "born 40", which was true in a way, I suppose, and though they sometimes wondered about lost aspects of my childhood, on the other hand, I never entirely gave it up, either (a house with no toys would be a dour house indeed, in my opinion). I was an early bloomer physically and sexually, kind of frightfully prodigious intellectually from the outset, but emotionally and socially I think I always struggled in strange ways and never truly related to my peers.
I could have fun with other kids, but couldn't really talk to them. I could talk to adults, but couldn't really have fun with them.
When I was around 13 years old, all of these forces seem to have clashed into a sort of terrifying adolescent cocktail.
I'd progressed from turning my nose up at the puppy-love relationships going on a few years earlier at school (believing even at the time that the flirtations were mostly a result of social pressures causing these kids — it only happened to the most popular and socially conscious ones, usually with older siblings — to want to act like the Big Kids), to being suddenly overcome with desire, and not having had any social practice for how to act upon it (I spent the better part of 7th grade trying to figure out how to ask one girl out — Kimberley — she moved away that summer, and faced with that finality I actually worked up the nerve to finally call her on the telephone to at least say goodbye. I've always wondered if she realized that although we spoke about little things at school every day, that one phone conversation had been 6 months in the making).
I did what I knew how to do: I wrote songs for girls, and poems, and elaborate and articulate (and sometimes rambling or needy) letters, only a few of which ever reached their destination, but when it came down to the easy stuff, that's where I always got confused, tongue-tied, or lost.
As such, I spent a lot of time living in my own head.
In 6th grade my best friend and I had begun creation of a language as sort of the Ultimate Secret Code, but as the intricacies of building a language from scratch became too tiresome for him and our friendship waned a bit over the next couple of years, the language became like a secret obsession of my own.
I created names and symbols for myself (Alkiem and Markiem were my two favorites — not sure where I came up with them, though in retrospect they both roughly translate to "this other place" in the language I'd made, so perhaps there was some sort of escapist origin there — I'm not sure now) and for the girls I had crushes on, so I could scribble thoughts about the various girls on book covers and file folders and class notes with relative impunity. I had other symbols I'd created, which tied into sort of a collective pseudo-religion that had been swirling about in my head — I didn't take it too seriously, but served as more than adequate inspiration for unique and bizarre drawings, poems, and scribbles, and at least lent a sense of self-identity to cling to. It was all fairly harmless, but I guarded the secrets with my life, which is ironic, because I'm sure to several friends and teachers it may have appeared as some sort of dangerous gang or cult activity (and oh was Lubbock obsessed with that, let me tell you), when in reality I was only pining after the pretty girl in 7th period math class, just like everyone else.
To really get people going, when in 9th grade for a Latin class fundraiser we were selling design-it-yourself pin-on buttons (a major hit, it turned out, because of the current fad of denim jackets covered from top to bottom with pins and buttons — I had my own which disappeared forever at a friend's pool party later that year), and on one of my own buttons I carefully drew a rendition of one of my favorite home-grown symbols and wore it around proudly. Having seen it on various notebooks and things of mine, one friend Lisa (the best friend of the fateful girl from 7th grade it turns out) refused to let me leave 9th grade computer class until I revealed its secret meaning. I finally caved and told her I'd made it up and that it was essentially meaningless but I thought it looked cool and gave me a sense of unique identity, but I guess that sounded far too bland and believable to be the actual truth.
I'd go through horrible bouts of depression, where I'd cry for hours for no reason. I'd pray for rain, because it made me feel better somehow (perhaps I liked the fact that the world was crying with me — I wrote a poem about that once), and even devised a ritual that I'd recite on the roof of my house to try to inspire the storm clouds to arrive. I had similar mantras and litanies for inspiring girls to notice me, or to hear me thinking about them at night — others to convince teachers not to call on me if my homework had blown away while I'd waited for the schoolbus that morning. No matter what was going on around me, chances are I was thinking about all of them and none of them a the same time.
I often woke up during the nights with searing leg cramps, chest pains, or headaches ("growing pains," my mom called them, though I never seemed to get much taller as a reward for enduring them), or I'd get so hung up on a crazy idea in my head that I couldn't sleep all night, and would get out of bed for school shortly after I had finally closed my eyes.
In 6th grade I had read in Diary of Anne Frank that many people thought the world would end in 2000. Occasionally I'd wonder if I could do something to make it arrive ten or twelve years earlier, or that some equally apocalyptic event could pass through, leaving me suddenly in college or adulthood, and free of all my current concerns.
Sometimes I'm convinced that if there is indeed a hell, it's junior high school. I look back at all the strange coping mechanisms I contrived to deal with a body that didn't make sense (I was teased mercilessly about my hairy legs, but I was still waiting for the legendary Growth Spurt, so most of my friends were at least 6 inches taller — some things still haven't changed I guess), an imagination that wouldn't stop, and my own peculiar breed of spirituality that no one seemed to understand, along with a set of seemly cryptic societal guidelines for how boys should ask girls out or should behave at dances (I found out later that a great deal of the confusion was caused by my parents' baby boomer rules codex being pegged onto an already fiercely independent Gen X culture, but at the time I didn't understand, and it was only made more bewildering by a private Victorian era etiquette class I and several of the Popular Kids took at one point). With all that, I honestly wonder what everyone else did to survive junior high.
In a few rare moments of honesty afterward each of my closest guy friends would confess to various acts of survival such as faking accidents or nausea when things got bad, practicing french kissing on an older sister so that the real thing would seem less scary, secretly wearing makeup because it made him feel special, inciting fights with his dad to the point of getting hit. I was, on one hand, horrified by some of these revelations, but on the other hand, knowing the strangeness of some of my own behavior, thankful that if it all came down to it, at least I wasn't the only weird one.
I guess what I'd forgotten, as I look around my bland almost-30-ish world, is that we were once all freaks, and so insecure and alone in the world, and that if hell really is as bad as junior high, most people would rather be bored and normal than to risk ever being looked at by other people again like they were looked at in 7th grade.
One thing it started me to thinking about was my own junior high experience. While it's true that the book's main character was a high school freshman, people mature at all different rates, and different aspects of their maturity also progress at different rates: physical development, emotional maturity, psychological complexity, sexual experience, experimentation with alcohol or drugs or smoking — lots of different things going on in those _-teen years. For a number of reasons, a lot of the feelings Charlie was experiencing I equated more closely with 7th, rather than 9th, grade (though many of his actually experiences I didn't run into until late high school — again that different rates thing).
Regardless, when I was a kid, I was all over the map, so to speak. My parents used to joke that I was "born 40", which was true in a way, I suppose, and though they sometimes wondered about lost aspects of my childhood, on the other hand, I never entirely gave it up, either (a house with no toys would be a dour house indeed, in my opinion). I was an early bloomer physically and sexually, kind of frightfully prodigious intellectually from the outset, but emotionally and socially I think I always struggled in strange ways and never truly related to my peers.
I could have fun with other kids, but couldn't really talk to them. I could talk to adults, but couldn't really have fun with them.
When I was around 13 years old, all of these forces seem to have clashed into a sort of terrifying adolescent cocktail.
I'd progressed from turning my nose up at the puppy-love relationships going on a few years earlier at school (believing even at the time that the flirtations were mostly a result of social pressures causing these kids — it only happened to the most popular and socially conscious ones, usually with older siblings — to want to act like the Big Kids), to being suddenly overcome with desire, and not having had any social practice for how to act upon it (I spent the better part of 7th grade trying to figure out how to ask one girl out — Kimberley — she moved away that summer, and faced with that finality I actually worked up the nerve to finally call her on the telephone to at least say goodbye. I've always wondered if she realized that although we spoke about little things at school every day, that one phone conversation had been 6 months in the making).
I did what I knew how to do: I wrote songs for girls, and poems, and elaborate and articulate (and sometimes rambling or needy) letters, only a few of which ever reached their destination, but when it came down to the easy stuff, that's where I always got confused, tongue-tied, or lost.
As such, I spent a lot of time living in my own head.
In 6th grade my best friend and I had begun creation of a language as sort of the Ultimate Secret Code, but as the intricacies of building a language from scratch became too tiresome for him and our friendship waned a bit over the next couple of years, the language became like a secret obsession of my own.
I created names and symbols for myself (Alkiem and Markiem were my two favorites — not sure where I came up with them, though in retrospect they both roughly translate to "this other place" in the language I'd made, so perhaps there was some sort of escapist origin there — I'm not sure now) and for the girls I had crushes on, so I could scribble thoughts about the various girls on book covers and file folders and class notes with relative impunity. I had other symbols I'd created, which tied into sort of a collective pseudo-religion that had been swirling about in my head — I didn't take it too seriously, but served as more than adequate inspiration for unique and bizarre drawings, poems, and scribbles, and at least lent a sense of self-identity to cling to. It was all fairly harmless, but I guarded the secrets with my life, which is ironic, because I'm sure to several friends and teachers it may have appeared as some sort of dangerous gang or cult activity (and oh was Lubbock obsessed with that, let me tell you), when in reality I was only pining after the pretty girl in 7th period math class, just like everyone else.
To really get people going, when in 9th grade for a Latin class fundraiser we were selling design-it-yourself pin-on buttons (a major hit, it turned out, because of the current fad of denim jackets covered from top to bottom with pins and buttons — I had my own which disappeared forever at a friend's pool party later that year), and on one of my own buttons I carefully drew a rendition of one of my favorite home-grown symbols and wore it around proudly. Having seen it on various notebooks and things of mine, one friend Lisa (the best friend of the fateful girl from 7th grade it turns out) refused to let me leave 9th grade computer class until I revealed its secret meaning. I finally caved and told her I'd made it up and that it was essentially meaningless but I thought it looked cool and gave me a sense of unique identity, but I guess that sounded far too bland and believable to be the actual truth.
I'd go through horrible bouts of depression, where I'd cry for hours for no reason. I'd pray for rain, because it made me feel better somehow (perhaps I liked the fact that the world was crying with me — I wrote a poem about that once), and even devised a ritual that I'd recite on the roof of my house to try to inspire the storm clouds to arrive. I had similar mantras and litanies for inspiring girls to notice me, or to hear me thinking about them at night — others to convince teachers not to call on me if my homework had blown away while I'd waited for the schoolbus that morning. No matter what was going on around me, chances are I was thinking about all of them and none of them a the same time.
I often woke up during the nights with searing leg cramps, chest pains, or headaches ("growing pains," my mom called them, though I never seemed to get much taller as a reward for enduring them), or I'd get so hung up on a crazy idea in my head that I couldn't sleep all night, and would get out of bed for school shortly after I had finally closed my eyes.
In 6th grade I had read in Diary of Anne Frank that many people thought the world would end in 2000. Occasionally I'd wonder if I could do something to make it arrive ten or twelve years earlier, or that some equally apocalyptic event could pass through, leaving me suddenly in college or adulthood, and free of all my current concerns.
Sometimes I'm convinced that if there is indeed a hell, it's junior high school. I look back at all the strange coping mechanisms I contrived to deal with a body that didn't make sense (I was teased mercilessly about my hairy legs, but I was still waiting for the legendary Growth Spurt, so most of my friends were at least 6 inches taller — some things still haven't changed I guess), an imagination that wouldn't stop, and my own peculiar breed of spirituality that no one seemed to understand, along with a set of seemly cryptic societal guidelines for how boys should ask girls out or should behave at dances (I found out later that a great deal of the confusion was caused by my parents' baby boomer rules codex being pegged onto an already fiercely independent Gen X culture, but at the time I didn't understand, and it was only made more bewildering by a private Victorian era etiquette class I and several of the Popular Kids took at one point). With all that, I honestly wonder what everyone else did to survive junior high.
In a few rare moments of honesty afterward each of my closest guy friends would confess to various acts of survival such as faking accidents or nausea when things got bad, practicing french kissing on an older sister so that the real thing would seem less scary, secretly wearing makeup because it made him feel special, inciting fights with his dad to the point of getting hit. I was, on one hand, horrified by some of these revelations, but on the other hand, knowing the strangeness of some of my own behavior, thankful that if it all came down to it, at least I wasn't the only weird one.
I guess what I'd forgotten, as I look around my bland almost-30-ish world, is that we were once all freaks, and so insecure and alone in the world, and that if hell really is as bad as junior high, most people would rather be bored and normal than to risk ever being looked at by other people again like they were looked at in 7th grade.