state of mind
I discovered this morning that I have the coping mechanisms of a teenager. Half-asleep in bed and reading NYT on my phone, I click into a piece on what parents can do about worsening adolescent mental health. I have no children, but I like reading these things to understand the state of parenthood. It comes in handy at work, but mostly, there’s nothing like someone saying BEWARE THIS SIDE for you to appreciate your lush, green, child-free, grass.
It is this paragraph that gets my attention:
It’s important for teenagers to express their emotions. Verbalizing feelings and talking about their internal world is one way that they do that. But it’s not the preferred option for every teenager. We need to respect that sometimes teenagers “get their feelings out” by going for a run. Or by putting on a playlist that matches their mood so that they can deepen themselves into that mood and then speed their way out of it. (via)
Or in my case, all of the above.
I think about this all day, wondering if I am the one who’s emotionally stunted, or we are all, in fact, just overgrown children playing an adult game of charades. Towards the end of the workday, I chat with a friend about relationships — the ugly side of fighting, cheating, the slow death of taking someone else for granted. I find out that she has to ply herself with alcohol whenever she and her partner decide to talk about their feelings. One time, she drank so much she passed out instead.
*
I laugh, but at this point in my life, I am no better. I think back to the days when I was still seeing my therapist. I learn on hindsight that it takes me two months to move the conversation beyond descriptors of “tired” and “angry”. “Anger is a secondary emotion,” she would say all the time. “What else are you feeling?” And I would talk around situations and issues and happenings while she graciously waited, week after week after week.
Towards the end of our 16 months together, we laugh at my baby therapy self. She tells me I am much better at articulating my feelings, regulating my mood. I tell her for the first time in years, I can hear the voice inside my head again. The voice, I say confidently, gives me clarity on whatever is going on inside of me. I feel more at peace now.
The thing is though, this voice that I was so happy to have back has not shut up since. The voice is what has always guided me, especially in my teens, so I have learned to trust it. But age has not dulled its bite. It is blunt, relentless, and sometimes unkind. It creates drama out of microscopic nothings. It is so loud in my head, narrating my every move, and yet it won’t make clear how I feel about my life until it’s too late.
So, in an effort to drown out this voice, I run. I write. I wallow in music. I eat erratically and sleep best when I am held accountable. I become a teenager haunted by my very worst self.
*
I end up reading the parenting article four, five times. I need an adult way to deal with myself, and here I am given clear guidelines on red flags to look out for. The priority is that teenagers have ways to get their feelings out that bring relief and do no harm.
My coping mechanisms can surely be classified as balms, but it is the “do no harm” part that is unclear. The definition — abusing substances, using technology in unhealthy ways, being hard on the people around them, or taking things out on themselves — doesn’t help. Maybe that in itself is worrying.
I keep being asked if I’m happy. I’m not sure how to answer that question truthfully. Is anyone just straight up happy?
In my life, there is so much joy, and in equal measure, hopelessness, frustration, despair. Some days are grim; others are easy. Life, right? Here is the pain of being ordinary and wanting the extraordinary. It is both acute and incredibly mundane. And it can be masked by teenage wilfulness, for as long as my adult self will let me.
