"You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets," says the doctor to Cecilia Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides,
to which she replies, "Obviously Doctor, you've never been a
13-year-old girl." Being young can be excruciating. Nothing really
matters and everything really matters; 'nothing' being whether it's too
late to change your career path now, or how much money you've got in the
bank or whether you should lower your standards because your romance
bounce rate is 90 percent, and 'everything' being how the hell you're
going to fit in and find your place in the world.
When you're a teenager, you'll probably be the most
emotional, irrational, passionate, obsessive, depressive, bored and
excitable you'll ever be in your life (at least all at once), but being
grown up isn't half as fun as growing up. Larry Clark, director of Kids,
the ultimate picture of teenagehood (if a slightly more extreme,
Clockwork Orange-esque version) told i-D in a 2008 interview, "It's the
time when many people have a lot more freedom than they will ever have,
where you're basically being taken care of, and you have all this free
time to explore, and have fun." When you eventually do grow up, you
realise that that's the only time you'll ever have the luxury to just
hang out at skate parks, be in a band, and do stupid things like pierce
your own ears with a very much unsterilised safety pin.
As Steve Carrell puts it in Little Miss Sunshine,
"High school - those are your prime suffering years. You don't get
better suffering than that." Picture your 11-year-old self next to your
18-year-old self. You changed. I'm in the early half of my twenties now
and I'm almost certain that I'll stay pretty much the same throughout
this whole decade, but the things one has to endure in those seven years
of secondary school are like nothing else.
For a few people, high school is easy, like riding a bike.
For most, the bike is on fire and everything is on fire and you're in
hell. In 1993, Dazed and Confused heartthrob Randall "Pink"
Floyd expresses a sentiment that is still felt pretty much universally
by teenagers today: "If I ever start referring to these as the best
years of my life, remind me to kill myself."
Let's start in Year 7. If you were a loner in primary
school, then you were either fine with also being a loner in secondary
school, or you saw it as your chance to reinvent yourself as the
confident, funny, potential you. If you were popular in primary school,
then secondary school was a gamble as to whether you could keep your
status in check. If it worked out, then great, you won at school. If it
didn't, then the next few years were a misanthropic descent into emo.
That's when the real insecurities, isolation and vulnerability of
adolescence set in. Bear in mind that this is being written by someone
for whom neither option worked out… My not so sweet sixteenth year of
living was spent sitting in the dark watching old River Phoenix
interviews, listening to Nirvana and feeling every word.
Then comes a series of firsts, the kind that as well as
getting you into a lot of trouble, will open up a whole new world to
you. There's your first kiss, the first time you smoke a cigarette, the
first time you discover alcohol, the first time you discover real
alcohol, and the first time you have sex. In 1983, Larry Clark published
a photo series called Teenage Lust. I won't go into whether
his chronicles of kids shooting up heroin or having underage sex are
creepy or not, you can read up and use your own moral barometer to
measure that. But the series perfectly depicts the overwhelming hunger
of teenage sexuality. Picture Lux Lisbon on the roof, doing what Peaches
later articulated in her song Fuck the Pain Away. It's fuelled
by a devastating curiosity that is met with excitement and
embarrassment in equal measure. Losing your virginity becomes a matter
of anyhow-anyway urgency, not only due to your own craving but also due
to, come on now, peer pressure. Once just one of your friends has lost
it, the race is on, which means if you were deflowered by your first
love, consider yourself lucky. For the majority it was an awkward
scramble to get it over with before school was out.
Then there's love. The first time you fall in it, it's all
about passion and fireworks and the fact that you'd bleed for each
other. It's only when you fall in love again that you realise the first
was mild infatuation. When we spoke to actress Emily Browning last year,
she summed up the phases of young love like so: "I've been in a
relationship for two years and this feels like the only time I've been
in love… Now I feel like love is when the person you're with really
wants you to be the best version of yourself and you want the same for
them and you can sit at home watching True Detective together for five
hours and be disgusting together." Sweet.
The clichéd benchmarks of coming of age are played out time
and again on screen, but how can you measure what that even means? It's
far too simplistic to pin it down to one thing like falling in love,
losing your virginity or getting your driving licence. In Crimes and
Misdemeanors, Sam Waterston says, "It's called wisdom. It comes to us
suddenly. We realise the difference between what's real and deep and
lasting versus the superficial payoff of the moment." I think that,
whether it comes to you suddenly, or sinks in slowly over the years, the
realisation that being yourself is the only thing that you can be for
any long period of time, and the only thing you should be, is the real
measure of coming of age.
This generation may be doing it younger, as social media
takes over, and for every kid today who measures their social success in
thumbs ups and likes, there's one who is wise beyond their years. For
teenagers like Malala Yousafzai, Willow Smith and Tavi Gevinson, who are
so aware of the issues that need to be fought, that wisdom seems to be
arriving sooner, and that's not a bad thing.
Whatever you do, at whatever time in your life, you come of
age. No matter how many rules they make you follow, "you gotta keep
livin' man, L-I-V-I-N", and remember [blows smoke ring and pokes a
finger through it], "don't let it die a virgin!"
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