The word "Teenager"

Sometimes, I find myself wondering where the particular trials I experience in life really stem from. Do my struggles with attention, motivation, interest, and writing come from some difference in my brain chemistry, or am I really just dumb? Or maybe I’m just lazy and useless. Or maybe it’s none of those and the problem lies in the way that our educational system is structured, that is, with little to no flexibility for anyone who learns in a different way, and systems of accommodation that find themselves mired in bureaucracy.

Similarly, my emotional reactions to the world are often called into question (By myself, anyways). Why is it exactly that I currently feel like my schoolwork — indeed, my life as a whole — entirely pointless? Why do I all of a sudden have an urge to completely abandon all sense of morality and rape someone (I know right, like WTF? I may also be fucked up in some other ways than listed above, but who knows), when only moments before I was laughing with a friend about the most innocent thing? And most of all, why do I have such polar experiences thinking about my future? Sometimes I feel ready to take on the whole world, knowing I can accomplish whatever I want if I set my mind to it, and I don’t even feel like it’ll be that hard. Other times I feel entirely hopeless, absolutely certain that the most I could possibly amount to is a low level office worker with no life outside of work and arguments on Reddit. And others I feel completely apathetic to the whole thing. What does it matter what I do with my life? I’ll only be here for at the very most a century, and what is there that I could really do in the 40 “useful” years of that?

This article is about a word, though. So what does all this shitty introspection into my very not-mentally-ok mind have to do with the word “Teenager?” The reason for my rambling (aside from me being prone to it) is that “teenager” often comes up as an answer to these questions I have. I ask: Why am I this way? And I respond with a simple: “You are a teenager, and you will grow out of it (or something like that) eventually.

It’s not a very satisfying response, is it? And on top of that, it entirely dismisses the base emotional experience that I am having. There’s nothing to the answer. It simply throws the experience into a box of age and all the stereotypes and images that come with that age, which in a way make the question even more confusing. I, personally, do not have a good understanding of the functions of the human teenage brain, despite living with one and being immersed in a community consisting almost entirely of people with them (also known as "high school." Just saying it gives me chills). Maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention in health class, but it seems that our comprehension of this particular thing is lacking.

So when I answer myself with “teenager,” I get frustrated (again, with myself) that such a vague and catch-all response is the first one to come to mind. “Teenager” is not an inherently bad response, but it does in this case reduce a human to a passing bump in the road. Interestingly, there was recently an article in the New York Times talking about this (sorry for the paywall). In essence, it states that when the field of adolescent psychology emerged, the process of growing up mirrored evolution. Adolescence was the Neanderthal stage. They literally were not fully homo sapiens yet. And obviously, a Neanderthal would not be equipped to participate fully in society, nor would they be in an optimal psychological state when compared to the rest of the population. This would be a neat little explanation for my problems; I'm just not human enough yet.

This evolutionary mirroring is not quite how we view adolesence today, but some parts of it do hold truth. To my understanding, there are some ways in which the adolescent brain is different from the adult brain. We always hear that the prefontal cortex keeps developing until you're 25. But the borders between adults and non-adults are always moving. Juliet is 13, for fucks sake. 8 year olds used to work in factories. In my mind, the societal border is somewhere between 18 and 21. But it seems to be shifting even now. The UK plans to lower the voting age to 16 for its next general election, and on the other end society's image of "actual" adult-ness seems to be shifting upwards. Some seem to beleive that you're not worth interacting with until you're out of college.