"The end is the beginning and yet you go on" Endgame, Samuel Beckett
The Volcano
My sister told me, quoting psychology, ‘our teenage years are our volcanic ones’.
‘We cannot always be held accountable for what we do or hold others accountable for what they do to us.’
The sentiment rang true.
To an extent.
Thinking of these years as volcanic was one the metaphors that helped me make sense of that time in my life.
(When we do not have words that define our sensations, it is time to get figurative – so excuse me if I do that a bit.)
I felt I lost myself in this period of growing up – completely, utterly, and wholly.
They were the consuming years.
The years where your entire self is lost, and a new identity is forged on you from the moment puberty begins to lurk its head. Remember the one that began to forged upon us when we left the womb? And just when it settled here come hormones.
In childhood I was myself (to whatever extent we are allowed to be ourselves) and in adulthood I was again. But in between I don’t know who I was, what I was or even who that person was.
I am not sure many of us do. Even more worryingly maybe many of us are so unable to bridge the gap between the two that we get lost and stuck there. In a boundary between childhood and adulthood. A limbo that we never break free from.
I was one of the lucky ones. I got out. But I did not get out unscathed.
As I guess many of us do not.
I think in my adult life I have met two kinds of people – the walking wounded and the perpetual teens.
I am still not sure which is the better option.
My teenage years left enough volcanic ash to linger upon me as I forged forward into adult life. It skewed my perceptions of love and self so much that it left me understanding that to love was to be in perpetual pain, denial, submission and appeasement. But, most importantly, I left them believing that abuse was part of being “in love”.
Fighting and anger meant a great consuming passionate love.
It was a terribly, terribly, damaging thing to learn and it was even more terrible that it became a belief. One that I considered to be a lesson of value for way too many years.
There is no lesson in being abused.
Ever!!! I could not add enough exclamation points to this point that would emphasise it enough.
Being abused means that you have absolutely no choice but to put yourself back together.
Being abused means that you have absolutely no choice but to put yourself back together.
From something that should have never happened in the first place!
It doesn’t protect you from more abusers and it doesn’t make you stronger.
Nor does it do any of the absolutely-fully-rounded, every emphasis on BS, that people tell us it does.
Instead, it is two things:
It is wrong and it is something you should have never had to go through.
The advantages of learning that you can get yourself up, piece yourself together and fight on are advantages that can be learned in other ways.
This bonus is never a reason to be thankful for being abused.
It took me years to understand that.
In many ways my teenage years ruined my life. I know how dramatic that sounds and I am not a victim of my life. But hear me out.
At the very best it sent me on a quest of discovery where I only ended up more lost. Lost to others’ opinions of me; lost in the belief that I could find myself in the way others saw me and that I could only exist when another – male – validated me enough to exist.
The Prequel
I was 12 years old when I no longer wanted to live anymore. At the bridge of my teenage life and perhaps a precursor to what was impending. Perhaps at 12, I knew that the next period of my life would not be worth living.
At 12 years old I felt that life was already too much. Maybe this is what every preteen suffers, to some extent or other. Remember, as previously mentioned, I was born dead. (If you don’t know what I am talking about see Diary Entry 1) And I don’t really believe death ever left me. (More on this in upcoming blogs – as death not leaving you is not as dismal as it sounds.)
I lived on at 12 for many different reasons. One reason was friends listening and reaching out to people to talk to me further. Another was a school intervention.
But, I think is was embarrassment that ultimately saved me.
Thankfully google did not exist and as I journeyed onwards into the teenage world, social media and cyber bullying were both words and a world we didn’t know yet.
I don’t know if I would have lived if I was born 12 years before this “brave new world” we find ourselves in currently.
I do know that we need to pay more attention to eight-year old’s, nine-year old’s, ten-year old’s, eleven-year old’s, twelve years old’s – all the ages. The world may have changed, but emotions have not, and the value we give children, and the level of their pain is constantly dismissed, underestimated and under nourished.
Before the Prequel
My first love, my grandfather, died when I was 8 years old. It was my first understanding of death that went beyond the loss of pets.
It was heart wrenching.
A pain I expected, mixed with the relief of a man who suffered greatly and too harshly for many years, finally set free.
But it was overwhelming grief.
At my grandfather’s wake I cried in my mother’s arms – inconsolable. The priest, new to the parish then, asked if it was my father who died. My mother responded, her grandfather. In the circle of her arms I wept and thought – it feels like my father – it feels too unbearable to be anything less.
My grandfather was in a hospital bed for many months before he passed, and I heard doctor and adult whispers about bed sores and gangrene and losing his legs. I have no idea what the truth of these conversations were or if they even occurred. To my childhood ears and mind I believed fully that they had cut his legs off, in those days, preceding his death.
When he lay in his open casket, a coffin in my bedroom – now transformed to the wake room. Burial style in Ireland eat your heart out. I believed he lay there as a torso only. I would secretly press on the silken cover that consumed the lower half of his corpse and try to see if I could feel his legs.
When I couldn’t, I was traumatised.
'Children Wallow in some terrible misunderstandings'
I never said a word. Not telling anyone that I believed that grandad lay there, legless in his coffin. I swallowed it and consumed it internally. As children do.
Children wallow in some terrible misunderstandings.
Years later I asked my mum if they had cut off his legs.
She laughed and laughed. Of course not, why would you think that?
And the matter was dropped. I believed a horror story that never happened for most of my life, and I am not sure if I still believe it or not.
For me granda still lies there in the coffin as half a body, and I hope my imagination finally lets the image go.
The Sequel
Years later, a now ex boyfriend’s stepdad, will end up in a tragic scenario where he does lose his legs. They cut them off when he is a coma, and mercifully he never wakes up to the living nightmare.
Mercifully he dies.
When I say goodbye to him – before they turn off the machines – I will sit beside him, alone, and stare at the sheets that fall flat where his whole legs should be. The sheets that are tucked, so flat, too flat, so neat, too neat, pressed under the upper half of his body and I will think:
‘How will his family ever recover from seeing this?’.
And I will never lose the image and it will be tied with the imagined image of my grandfather and the very real image of the truth forever more.
BUT: This image, just like that of my grandad, is imaginary.
The doctors did not tuck the sheets beneath him – they lay them spread out giving the illusion that he was still whole – that his entire body lay under those sheets – intact.
They had the consideration of course not to confront us with the reality of his torso – his half body. But I still saw them tucked carefully underneath. I saw it as I sat by his bedside. I see it constantly in my memory. The reality faded, and my reality is the sheets tucked neatly around a terrible nightmare.
I hope that his family has less an imagination than I have. But likely they do not.
Both these events – one in childhood and one in adulthood rattle me eternally.
The in-between
To describe our teenage years, I think we must go backwards and forwards. Our teenage years are everything we already experienced in childhood and an understanding of everything we will experience in adulthood. Wrapped into 4 years of terrible torture, from approximately 13 to 17 years old. Until finally, we are released again, ready to regulate ourselves, our choices, our friends, our exposures.
But trying to understand our teenage years as a teenager is like trying to know the ending of something you have never read or seen.
Adulthood already visits us. Hell, I think many of us already know the future when we are a teenager. Is this called foreshadowing? We are hit with emotions, hormones, separation, isolation, egoism, judgement, hatred, misunderstanding in one horrendous whack. We lose our love of all our comforts.
EVERYTHING becomes uncool and we are trapped in our peer bubble. Whether it is safe to be there or not.
The conclusion
To say that these years are the third monster we meet is probably to underestimate these years. Especially if we suffer something terrible at this time of our lives.
These are also the years when we are exposed to many more monsters as we start to venture out into the world alone – without the hands that held us before we arrived here suddenly.
If you are someone that would go back to those years in a flash. Loved that part of experience. Then I, whole heartedly, tip my hat to you.
You did a good job at escaping when that volcano erupted.
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