Teenagers

The wise voices of My Chemical Romance once sang,  'Teenagers Scare the Living Sh*t out of me".

For a middle-of-her-late-twenties person, I spend such an amazing amount of time with teenagers.  More time with teenagers than my own family, than my friends of my own age and with my own partner, really.  Depending on the place and time, these teenagers function either as my students, my athletes that I coach, my peers, and in some instances, my friends.  While they don't particularly scare the living sh*t out of me all that often anymore, they do absolutely fascinate me. 

I feel that this could be a rather lengthy journal, and I fear it could get tedious if I just keep going on and on and on so I might discuss a few different things that fascinate me over the course of a couple of entries.  That way, if y'all get bored, you can just move on quickly...

Tonight, I found the fascination in the fact that teenagers do a lot of things that they don't enjoy.  For example, ballet class.  It became very aparent to me tonight that pretty much almost none of the girls in my ballet class actually wanted to be there doing it.  And I wondered if they really did actually hate it, or if they were just saying they hated it cos everyone else was hating it so therefore it is cooler to dislike ballet and not pay attention.  Or, do they really actually hate it cos it is boring and slow and repetitive?  They are also forced to be there cos if they want to jazz and neo-classical, they have to do ballet first.  So that could also be a contributing factor.

But me, I chose to do the class because I desperately need to get my dance technique back in track, I need some mental discipline and I appreciate how effective having strong ballet technique is for all other genres of dance.  So I love ballet class, for the first time in my life - when i was younger I hated it because I was so terrible at it.  I am still terrible now, but I can find the humour in my terrible-ness.

It made me feel sad for these teenagers who were hating the class and not seeing the beauty and grace in what they were doing.  I didn't get to do ballet until quite late in my dance training, hence my lack of skill in that style, so these girls are so lucky they get to do it now so that their bodies can be stronger. 

And then it makes me feel sad that so many years of my life were wasted being a teenager who hated everything.  It really must be a right of passage - you hate everything in your teens and then grow to love and appreciate everything through the course of your twenties, so then you can really live in your 30s as a super well adjusted adult...

I used to play squash, I went to dance - tap, jazz, irish, contemporary, I played the clarinet, I did subjects I loved at school, I spent time with friends etc etc.  Yet I hated going to all those things, I hated so many people and even at times my friends annoyed me so I hated them.  So while I loved my hobbies, at the same time, I hated going to them.  HOW WEIRD IS THAT?  The more I think of how depressing being a teenager was, the more I think of how sad it is that my life was spent like that for so long!  I really do vow to be not like a teenager for the rest of my life so that it hopefully cancels itself out! 

So, the funny thing is, is that a previous journal (i am awkward with the word blog so I am calling my blog my journal) entry was saying how last week I hated what I was doing.  That will now be known as my Teenager Moment.    The moment when you hate something you actually really love. 

And this is why teenagers scare me.  Because even when you think you aren't one, you have a teenager moment.