The Reoccurring Teenager

I beginning to think that we all have this reoccurring teenager within us.  I’m sitting here after a meditating on the phase, “Three things cannot be hidden, the sun the moon and the truth”( I’m also fond of “You only lose that which you cling to”) and I have been reflecting on how I feel.  I saw my youngest sister married today, I have been bombarded by emotional tidal waves and I have stayed steadily swimming towards the shore.  There were moments of course where I felt I might drown, where I might be pulled into the darkness of the deepest parts of the ocean, but somehow, I did not succumb to those powerful forces.

Finally, I emerged from this voyage, beaten and battered but still moving forward because I must.  Weddings are always emotional, add any family dynamic and it’s twice so, add in coming home again, and it’s thrice so, and so on.  So here you are at an event that inevitably most have to attend, and inevitably that most will feel the stirring of this teenager inside, and unless you stop for a moment to think on it, you might miss the little trouble maker.  

Now it is possible that as a teenager you were a peach, an untroubled child who was able to stay pretty put together and in those cases you have little to worry about, but in the other cases, the ones I have seen with friends and myself those years will tumultuous and traumatic and ripe with all sorts of chaotic and distressing feelings.  Anger, resentment, abandonment, and bitterness are just a few feelings that the teenager within harbors and guards, and if you are not careful that inner teenager will take over for unspecified periods of time, it is for this reason that you must be aware.

It’s actually quite natural, you feel like you are drowning into the darkness and the time in your life that you most felt that was as a teenager, and so you that teenager found an opening a way to emerge, and before you can realize it you want to let the waters take you, or you want to run away, or you are so angry you want to shut everyone out.  Can you remember as a teenager how many people in your life you were angry with, it’s exhausting, but so easy to fall prey to the reoccurring teenager who waits for the right moment to pop back up and say hello to the world.

I long for a beautiful day at the cemetery where I can visit my loved ones and sleep beside them because it brings me peace, and because I have always felt the dead understand me far more than the living can, but I have felt this way since I was a teenager.  This behavior while odd to some is not considered bad, so I let the teenager within have this one,  but be careful, teenagers are give an inch take a mile by their nature.  You could concede to something small and end up fueling the fire, and angry at everyone, angry at parents for abandoning you or neglecting you, angry at family for not being there, angry at everyone for not protecting you and angry at yourself for being any kind of victim, this is the danger of the reoccurring teenager, all these issues easily come to the surface, and you might say “well if they are there you didn’t really deal with them.”  Or “you just need to move on”  but the sad reality is, our teenage years are the years where we find ourselves. 

We are taught and learn what our parents have to offer by the age of 13 (probably younger now) and from that point forward we are trying to figure out who we are.  So this teenager ingrained in us, it is part of us, it is a footprint of what happened to help us find ourselves.  For some it is a light footprint, for others a deep footprint, for some it is a reminder of what to do, for others a reminder of what not to do.  We cannot simply “get over” our teenage self, we have to get to know our teenage self, we have to be aware of it, and most importantly we have to stop denying it is there.  We have to honestly look at ourselves and identify what is the reoccurring teenager and what is the adult, and there may be times where it is appropriate to be both, there may be times were you need to grab a hold of the stubborn, hurt, angry and confused teenager and be firm enough not to go that route. 

I was always creative, as a teenager I knew what I wanted, but the adults said oh no that can’t be, be realistic, that was the worse advice ever!  I say do what you love! That reoccurring teenager is much happier when you are true to yourself, after all, that is what being a teenager is all about, it is about learning who you are.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m successful in what I have done, but I find my life lacking, and I know it is because I got away from who I was and am, and the further away I was the more that teenager reoccurred, I wanted to run-away, hide, push everyone away, but I wanted that because I had lost myself and my reoccurring teenager knew that, and knew it was the job of the teenager to find oneself.  So be aware, when you lose control, or lose yourself and you feel that reoccurring teenager boiling up inside, you might have lost yourself and it might be time find yourself again. 

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Costs of Success

Success is relative, and universal all at once.  What I view as success others may not, on the other hand many people have said they thought I was successful when I didn’t see it.  I think the key to a happy and fulfilling life is to have goals and to strive for success.  Big successes and small successes everyone wants to be successful.  When you set a goal and reach it, you are successful, but those goals can vary in difficulty level.  There is no doubt the harder the goal is the more successful you feel.  What a dynamic to add, so the student that is working towards a degree who has had nothing and no help might feel a bigger sense of success than the person who didn’t have to work through the degree might feel less of a sense of accomplishment or success. 

There is one thing that everyone who is successful has done, they have worked hard at something, the harder they work the more successful they become.  I wonder, however, what are the characteristics of people that are successful on a grand scale, the fashion designer who is known around the world, the business mogul making millions, the DJ’s and musicians that make it big, the actors and actresses that are in big and numerous movies, what do they do that are different. 

Of course hard work, of course dedication, of course self-discipline, of course  innovation, of course we know the more obvious things needed for success but what about the emotional, what about the mindset.  Do you need to have the mindset that no one and nothing else matters, do you need to be self-centered and selfish.  Can you be successful on a grand scale and be nice, or must you harden yourself and your skin, and move through without a care for how others think or feel?  Then if you must be harder, tougher or thicker skinned, is it worth the potential costs.  These are the questions I  am considering this evening.  

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Abandoning abandonment and moving forward.

Periodically throughout my life I have moments of great clarity, where I think I have magically solved one or more issues and I have moved forward.  Sometimes I have, and other times I have not.  While am woefully aware of my issues and shortcomings I have come to accept that I am human, and as such not perfect.  Really I am nobody, I am going nowhere, I read a book titled something similar on Buddhism.  Don’t misunderstand me, I am very successful in the eyes of some of my peers, I overcame obstacles and bought a home, a car and a motorcycle the three things I always wanted.  Still, even with all the “things” I set goals for achieved, I was empty, missing something, I always wanted to be a singer and songwriter, maybe that was it, so I made a point to focus more on my passions.  Still, something always seems like it is missing.  I’ve looked to the outside for it when I ought to have been looking within.

I’ve a strange past with trauma and loss, don’t we all, and it can be easy to disregard or overemphasize the importance of this past and the events within it.  Yet, you cannot easily move forward if you do not learn from your past, in fact you may not move forward at all if you cannot learn. So you learn, or you think you learn, you try to learn, and sometimes you relearn. 

I’ve taken a look at my past in an effort to heal and learn and leave the past in the past.  Everything you experience leaves an imprint on you, the more significant the event the larger the imprint.   I used to say my mom was the only person that was with me since birth, until her death, but even that is not true, not if I am honest about it and how I feel .  My mother was there since I was born that was true, and she left the state seeking to heal and grow herself, my biological father had next to no contact with me, he came to visit one time, and I was too little to remember.  So right away I was abandoned by my biological father, but I was taken in by my Dad, but later after Nana and Papa died when I was 11 or 12 Dad left.   He would take his two children to visit him but not me, I was abandoned again.  I couldn’t know, as a child of 12 to 13 much more than how things appeared and how I felt.  When I was 13 my mom packed me up and sent me away to meet my father, it took two hours, I was devastated.  My mother had abandoned me too.  Now I was acting out, I wanted my dad back, I wanted my normal life back, I hated the guy she started dating, I hated that my dad was gone, I hated everything.  I was thirteen, what would anyone expect. 

So I went to a new state, losing everything I had ever known for all of my life that I could remember, and I went to live with my sister and her mother at first and not my father, until she didn’t want me there, and so I felt abandoned all over again.  In my now somewhat grown up mind I can understand she was 13 and wanted her things and her space, but as a thirteen year old I couldn’t understand that then. 

It seemed the sky would fall on me, everything kept going wrong, bad things happened all the time, I couldn’t figure out what a relationship should really be, I just wanted to be loved.  For YEARS I just wanted to be loved.  I didn’t realize that the emptiness I was feeling couldn’t be filled from outside, I didn’t know it had to come from me.

Finally I reached a point with my Dad where we began to heal, and I felt loved, and part of a family again, and though the emptiness and doubt remained the healing was steadily working.  I was able to see what I had been missing and the loss and how it affected me, but I still had not learned my lesson yet.  I was still looking for someone else to, my family, to help fill that void.  I have great sisters and brothers, some are spoiled, some are punks, some are eccentric and some think themselves better but I love them, I will never not love them, they are all different and all love differently, they can’t love me the same way, but they do love me.  Even if they don’t does it matter, should it matter?  If my dad didn’t love me, if he didn’t want me as his child would it matter.  I’ve carried this abandonment for most of my life.

For once I reflected on it all, and I realized, I was my worst enemy.  I hadn’t been looking into myself for love.  It was crazy, I’ve been feeling alone, like I didn’t belong anywhere, like I was an orphan for about 10 years before my family in NOLA helped get me on the path of healing, they did that by being there, not giving up on me, and encouraging me.  Then my other family really began to heal as well, but all that healing means nothing if you hold on to the abandonment.  Of course you don’t mean to, you don’t even know you are doing it, but you are.  I often go between feeling like I am all alone, and completely blessed to have such a large and wonderful network of family and friends.  I had to address the issue.

So I decided to abandon my abandonment issues, because they do nothing but hold me back, and because I can only find true peace within myself.  I am the only person who truly knows me, no one else has been there, I am the only one who can decide to heal, move on, or let go.  How do you abandon abandonment, you just have to make a choice.  There is no doubt that it shapes you, it does, but don’t let it have you, take yourself back.  Because, everyone feels abandoned and the people that did the leaving might have no idea the damage they did, so it is up to you to heal.  It is up to you to say to yourself, yes I felt abandoned and yes I am afraid it will happen again but I won’t let it change me, and I won’t live in fear, and in the end I will find solitude and peace within myself, I will love myself, because no one else can give that to me.  I am abandoning abandonment, I will find my solitude and my peace, because only I can give it to myself.  

People will come and go in time, nothing is promised for tomorrow, so let go, free yourself.  

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