If I Were A Teenager Again...
I'd do it right this time. (My love letter to being twenty-something and practically unemployed).
The book that I haven’t been working on is about time travel. Or rather, what happens when a person looks back at their past so often, they get stuck in it. But I’ve spoken more about the book and its time travel components than actually working toward bringing it into fruition. I’ve more or less looked at what I’ve written and decided I have to restart everything. Turn the whole page over and observe something new, surmise if a title like, While You’re Still Young, has any marketing value, or if new time travel books are just reinventing the Vonnegut-Slaughterhouse-Five-Wheel. These kind of musings, of course, do nothing for writers.
But I’ve been thinking about what it means to have youth as it’s still happening for me. I’ve been the same young woman I’ve always been. Younger, then young, and then young, as in she’s young. she’ll learn eventually. Young as in there is not enough of you to understand how the world functions with the halve of you walking around in it. Young people always seem to be of half a mind or completely behind. I walk around feeling like Mitski’s line in “First Love/Late Spring,” Yet now, I find I’ve grown into a tall child.
When I was struggling to make it into the arts back when I was twenty and twenty-one, living with a Danish woman who charged $400 for a room and urged me to pick up a night job at Amazon, I embodied every stanza of “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars,” running on the last of the high from my solo trip to South Korea. I don't know how I'm gonna pay rent/I wanna see the whole world…
In my failure to make it to the big universities for film school, returning to the Central Valley in 2021 to live with my parents, I cried exclusively to “Class of 2013.” My childhood bedroom had been given to my sister. In my brother’s old room, I occasionally snuck cheap wine I’d purchased from Aldi’s into the bedroom and cracked the cap open beneath the covers. Mom, I'm tired/Can I sleep in your house tonight?/Mom, is it alright/If I stay for a year or two?/Mom, I'll be quiet/It would be just to sleep at night/And I'll leave once I figure out/How to pay for my own life too.
I returned to the Danish Woman’s house in July, a few days before my twenty-second birthday after a falling out with my folks. I don’t remember if there were any of Mitaki’s discography that I delved into then but all I could think about was how little of the world I really wanted to know or understand. In my memory of those times, I was really still just a teenager–a Tall Child, young through and through. There would never be enough of me in the world to survive it.
And at twenty-four, I sometimes feel that I’m living a new low. Just as before, I’m living in my brother’s old bedroom in my parents’ home in Southern California, my sister having taken my old bedroom where I’d scribbled all my teen angst into the drywall a decade ago. It’s here, after graduating from university, that I recognize I am still the same teenage girl I’d hoped to shed in adulthood. Nothing, it seems, has really changed; I’m working the same part-time job I had in community college; I haven’t had my own place or even moved from the city where I attended middle school, high school, and my aforementioned community college (their parking lot being five miles out from where my car’s parked, currently); I’m waiting for my back-up plan of being substitute teacher to come to fruition as my teaching permit undergoes processing, a months-long wait where I’ve applied for writing-related postings in the meantime. I keep an up-to-date count of all submitted resumes and the ratio in which they’ve received responses (as of December, 2023, it’s 37:3). I’m draining savings by the month. I’m reconciling with the fact that I have a big nose but too big of an ego to get a nose job, learning what facial toner is, trying not to actively display the desperate urgency in my cover letters at how much I need this job, and, yes, I am still working on my novel, slowly shaving off more bad writing from the few opening pages I have left than I am laying down new ones.
At work, before any of the stores in the shopping centers have even switched on most of their lights, I think about the time after my shift, what writing can be done when I clock out, changed out of work clothes and put pen to paper, actually touch my keyboard. Then, when the shift begins to slow, I’ll think about my time in high school, how time has moved through me since then.
I can’t say I look back at those years with much fondness. With so much animosity and competition, from the desire to make it to the luxury of a well-renowned school to eating just slices of wheat bread day to day to make it through the week without the carbs of a full meal, there was a hardly a moment where joy could be found. I’d slot my backpack off my shoulders when I made it home from school and climb into bed. I wouldn’t get up to move unless it was to shower or for dinner, then rejoin the bed. I don’t remember when or how I ever managed to get my homework done, but somehow, I did. My GPA dropped 2 whole numbers by the end of my senior year. I was hardly qualified to graduate.
But did it have to be that way? I guess I find myself asking. I got back intoTumblr for the purpose of looking for some good, some inkling that it really hadn’t been all bad. And really, because if I couldn’t move forward–in school, in my career, in writing—then I would just turn backward, right into the depths of my younger, internet-sleuth self. There, I found all the past ventures my teenage mind sought after post-study hours: behind-the-scenes photos of the kitsch in Moschino’s 2014 Ready-to-Wear collection and Baby Phat denim mini-skirts, messy Sophia Coppola-esque, powder-pink bedrooms, reblogging paparazzi photos of Lady Gaga post-awards shows and film stills exhibiting the styling of Jenna Rink in 13 Going On 30 twice in the same week. In the four years I was dedicated to my blog, I anticipated, that when I was twenty, my life would be all novelty handbags and being Jennifer Garner (whatever that meant).
But Tumblr made girlhood sound like living. This life just resuscitated, tasting air after a brief eternity. Through the young woman’s eye, the Big Bang happens in their own lifetime–through rejection, loss, failure, FOMO for all the things that haven’t happened yet–over and over again, and then the whole world comes back together, all in that long tunnel of burgeoning girlhood. And it looked beautiful, like how most things on Tumblr seem. But I’ve had girlhood when it was cruel and unrelenting, when the pieces of your immediate world took ample time to come back together (if it all) until it wasn’t girlhood anymore. I guess it’s meant to suck the first go-around. Maybe it only gets good the second.
Then a very real thought passed through my head a few weeks ago, immortalized in my journal: If I were a teenager again, I could do it right this time.
Which isn’t to say that I’d go back to 2013, be inside those memories and alter the rollout of that year. But if it did happen, and I were 14, re-experiencing teenage emotions and obstacles, I think I’d live through it all with some understanding this time. I would be okay with the fact that I’m a teenager. I wouldn’t hold it against myself for having been the emotional, angry, shame-stricken girl that I was then. I think I’d embrace it all a little more forgivingly. I think there was reason to not have reacted otherwise. The world doesn’t like teenage girls much. How else do you cope with that known but unspoken knowledge that you’re supposed to grow into yourself while being regarded as a monolith of temperament and vulnerability? You’re a teenage girl after all. What would you know?
And the truth was that I didn’t know much at all to begin with. But I would’ve begged for a morsel of sympathy then for us that were young girls, that were treated as such. I certainly didn’t stand a chance. I grew up with an angry father and a stubborn mother, a warhead for a skull that I used to write and do math with. How was I supposed to do all the things that I did then with kindness? How does anyone get through those awkward and angsty years without collision as promise? Or maybe collision is not the word at all to prescribe teenage adolescence. Maybe we’re not car wrecks burning gas along the interstate or space fucking off into new matter, maybe we’re just people running into ourselves over and over, hitting shoulders along the hot summer sidewalk pavements and walking on. Sometimes you’ll recognize them. Sometimes, you’ll go, who was that? and a car will pass you and reach the streetlight, another vision of You gazing into the side view mirror, and then, drive on. Everyone will pass you.
Sometimes, I imagine a moment in the classroom with all those kids staring up at me in front of the whiteboard, and I’m looking at all their faces, their eyes following my still hands, waiting for some direction. They’re all so young, as the true adults of the world would say, but God, I’m right there with them. I’m so young and foolish. I’m no closer to an adult than you, I would probably say to them. I’m no bigger than you are. And I think that sometimes, I’m even less than you. I’ve got a decade between us, but my Mom still reminds me to wash the dishes I left in the sink in the morning. I pay $300 for my own bedroom but my boyfriend can’t walk in there unless he’s got a deathwish. I pay the water and the internet, and yet, nothing in the house really feels like it’s mine. There’s nothing I really own, you know?
And I raise my hands to the kids, like I’m waiting to catch a piece of sky that might drop from the ceiling. With nothing waiting for me, I keep going.
You know how you all feel right now? Like you’re not enough but somehow there’s enough of you to have a student I.D., a name and a grade level? There’s just enough of you to put your name down on paper but nothing else after that is legible–what you are, who you’ll be? That list only increases by a little after high school. The extent of your autonomy hardly changes. They’ll not only take you seriously when it feels right, but also dismiss your capabilities from the start. It’s like how you’re all expected to learn how to drive but you can’t go anywhere with it–you can’t be trusted with your mom’s car. And you can’t be in your room for too long but you can’t be out of it for any longer than when your dad remembers you might know how babies are made but not how much they cost. And then there’s that sense that even if it’s shitty now, eventually you’re gonna get out of here, right? You’re gonna graduate with the skin on your back at the very least, and all the embarrassing, catastrophic, world-ending thinking you’ve carried will die with all the memories that shaped this time and place. You’ll get to move on from it. You’ll like yourself more after all of it.
From the inside, even a classroom feels big. I imagine there’s 40 of them–students, besides myself–sitting in rows of five, eight to a lane, and they look nothing like me. They’re all so vastly different. And like me, they’ll have trouble looking at themselves with any worth. So I tell them the only good thing I’ve concluded after all of this–this adulthood, this Tall Child phenomenon–and the only thing I believe a teenager becoming of a twenty-something year-old can find solace in:
You’ll become me one day, and only when you realize how terribly ill-equipped you are to be twenty-anything, you’ll be so much kinder to the person you are now, sitting in those seats. You’ll even love them–better than anyone else did at that time.
I’m twenty-four years-old and grazing the touchstone of girlhood again, and that means doing what I can with what I’ve got–because isn’t that all what being a girl was? Working with what you had? With all that you were given when you were thirteen, discovering everything that could possibly be wrong with you, your body, your choices, your voice, your decisions your life your ambitions your desires your intuition your tastes–and then still keep going? You still went outside like everyone else. Took the sunlight to your face in all of its textured glory. You still made your own choices, decisions, ambitions, desires and creations. So that’s what I’ll do.
Because what is twenty-anything other than learning you are more than qualified to handle teenage life now. You’ll know what it means to not worry about a future that doesn’t look like anything because you’ll have lived it–and survived. It won’t resemble girlhood. In fact, it won’t be something you can see. It’ll be sounds, and they’ll all sound like you. And when you’re thirty, you’ll have finally known how to have acted when you were twenty-anything, buying Ganni buckle heels after you’ve paid rent and put 10% into your retirement savings. And if you’re thirty, and none of these feelings go away, then wait till fourty, then fifty, and if you still haven’t got it in you to recognize you’re looking back so much that you’re running in circles, at least love the person you run into back there. Tell them there’s no rush to write the whole novel. Tell them there will always be more days. Hug them softly. There are no Mitski songs that can tell the both of you how much you’ll need it.
Further Reading
“Girlhood” as reminisced by Sandy Liang for The New York Times.
“I’m Broke and Friendless and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life” from Ask Polly
Things I’ve Loved Lately…
Guillermo Del Toro's words to people in their 20's. It’s in Spanish with no English subtitles available but the gist of it is this: Life has not passed you on. You have a lot of fucking time.
I re-watched Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) for the sixth time recently and I cried again (for the sixth time).
Such a refreshing read! What a way to encapsulate what it is to me a woman growing up. When you’re a teenager you want nothing but to grow up but when you’re an adult you’d rather go back into the past and fix whatever it is that plagues us from our youth. But realistically we only want to go back in time because we NOW have the knowledge and “know” better and not because we want to go back being 13 with the same mentality we had then. Love love love this.