half a world (or more) away
Feb. 11th, 2011 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishAs seen around the web, most recently at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
badmagic and kdsorceress, a letter.
... what could I possibly say to my fifteen-year-old self?
Fifteen was freshman year of high school. The twin hells of junior high and Fayetteville were over, but they left some pretty deep scars. I'd love to tell myself how to make things better, or at least how to feel better about things, but there's nothing I could hear. I would have needed some serious therapy, not to mention different parents, before I could have done much of anything differently.
Nothing helps. By freshman year I had two choices: break, and be what was expected of me, and be utterly miserable; or (the choice I made) fight, and spend so much of my energy in fighting that I had none left to revisit harmful behavior patterns, and be utterly miserable. Lucking into a better shrink in the middle of junior year might have helped, but the odds of that were pretty slim since he was picked by my parents.
"Hang in there, it gets better" is cold fucking comfort in that situation, but it's about all I've got.
Dear fifteen-year-old Tucker:
(Yes, I'm calling you Tucker. It's your name. You may as well get used to it.)
Congratulations on surviving Fayetteville. I'm not kidding: the last two years were the worst of your life, and the three before were no picnic either. The good news is, you'll never have to go through anything like that again. The bad news is, the next five years are, in some ways, going to be even harder.
I think you already know why: your parents are poisonous.
They have in their heads an idea of who you are that matches up with who they want you to be. You survived Fayetteville in large part by letting them think that they were right about that. Trouble is, that's not who you are. It's not even who you want to be. You're starting to get some hints that you can be someone other than who they want you to be, which is good. Getting to the point where you can be that person is going to suck. A lot.
To take just one example, they've told you, over and over, "You're good enough to be anything you want to be." That's a trap. Two traps, even. You can see one of them even if you can't verbalize it yet: you don't know how to find out what you want. The reason you can't find out what you want is the other trap: the unspoken "As long as what you want isn't something we disapprove of."
Fuck them.
You're good enough to do anything you want, you're good enough to make a living doing anything you want, and you're good enough to want anything you want. Full stop.
Learning to want things for yourself is really bloody hard. It's harder when the two most important people in your life are telling you that everything you want for yourself is wrong. You're going to spend the next dozen years just learning that it's okay and even good to want things for yourself, and then at least another ten figuring out what those things are.
For instance, you already know you don't want to become an engineer. Even though you're good at math and other left-brainy things. Even though you're at a science and tech high school. Even though it pays well. Even though you're scared that you're too far behind to learn to program. Even though engineering is what your parents want you to do. It's not something you want to do, and forcing yourself to want to do it is going to work about as well as forcing yourself to do something you don't want to ever has.
Pay attention to the things you like doing, and do as many of them as you can, as often as you can. They'll serve you well later on.
Also, Jefferson is not Fayetteville. It's not exactly the real world either, but socially it's a hell of a lot more like the real world than Fayetteville ever was. And here in the real world, people like you. Chicks dig you. Most important, you have a support system that's genuinely supportive. It breaks my heart that you won't see the evidence of that last for another two years, and then because of why you see it you won't believe it even then. But it's still true, and they can keep you going through the worst of what's to come.
Finally, you are a damn fine writer. I'm not just saying that because the competition up to now has been crap: you are, genuinely, a good writer. You can make something of this, regardless of how many times your mother says "that's nice but how are you going to put food on the table?" So, for the love of god, stick with it and write more. Write fragments and beginnings, and show them to your friends, and when they say "cool! so what happens next?" (as they will), keep writing.
There's plenty of other advice I could give you: take real Computer Science instead of Computer Science For Idiots; trade orchestra for drama; don't invite JMH to join Troupe next year, since he's secretly a first-rate jerk. That stuff doesn't really matter, though. If you'll just start ignoring your parents, trusting your (non-JMH) friends and yourself, and writing more, you'll do fine.
Although, honestly? You'll turn out fine anyway. This will just help you get there a little sooner, and maybe with fewer scars along the way. I'd tell you about it, but you'd never believe me.
Love,
thirty-four-year-old Tucker
PS: If you're thinking about kissing her, stop thinking and kiss her already. You'll be wrong maybe twice in the next four years, and it will be totally worth it. --T.
badmagic and kdsorceress, a letter.... what could I possibly say to my fifteen-year-old self?
Fifteen was freshman year of high school. The twin hells of junior high and Fayetteville were over, but they left some pretty deep scars. I'd love to tell myself how to make things better, or at least how to feel better about things, but there's nothing I could hear. I would have needed some serious therapy, not to mention different parents, before I could have done much of anything differently.
Nothing helps. By freshman year I had two choices: break, and be what was expected of me, and be utterly miserable; or (the choice I made) fight, and spend so much of my energy in fighting that I had none left to revisit harmful behavior patterns, and be utterly miserable. Lucking into a better shrink in the middle of junior year might have helped, but the odds of that were pretty slim since he was picked by my parents.
"Hang in there, it gets better" is cold fucking comfort in that situation, but it's about all I've got.
Dear fifteen-year-old Tucker:
(Yes, I'm calling you Tucker. It's your name. You may as well get used to it.)
Congratulations on surviving Fayetteville. I'm not kidding: the last two years were the worst of your life, and the three before were no picnic either. The good news is, you'll never have to go through anything like that again. The bad news is, the next five years are, in some ways, going to be even harder.
I think you already know why: your parents are poisonous.
They have in their heads an idea of who you are that matches up with who they want you to be. You survived Fayetteville in large part by letting them think that they were right about that. Trouble is, that's not who you are. It's not even who you want to be. You're starting to get some hints that you can be someone other than who they want you to be, which is good. Getting to the point where you can be that person is going to suck. A lot.
To take just one example, they've told you, over and over, "You're good enough to be anything you want to be." That's a trap. Two traps, even. You can see one of them even if you can't verbalize it yet: you don't know how to find out what you want. The reason you can't find out what you want is the other trap: the unspoken "As long as what you want isn't something we disapprove of."
Fuck them.
You're good enough to do anything you want, you're good enough to make a living doing anything you want, and you're good enough to want anything you want. Full stop.
Learning to want things for yourself is really bloody hard. It's harder when the two most important people in your life are telling you that everything you want for yourself is wrong. You're going to spend the next dozen years just learning that it's okay and even good to want things for yourself, and then at least another ten figuring out what those things are.
For instance, you already know you don't want to become an engineer. Even though you're good at math and other left-brainy things. Even though you're at a science and tech high school. Even though it pays well. Even though you're scared that you're too far behind to learn to program. Even though engineering is what your parents want you to do. It's not something you want to do, and forcing yourself to want to do it is going to work about as well as forcing yourself to do something you don't want to ever has.
Pay attention to the things you like doing, and do as many of them as you can, as often as you can. They'll serve you well later on.
Also, Jefferson is not Fayetteville. It's not exactly the real world either, but socially it's a hell of a lot more like the real world than Fayetteville ever was. And here in the real world, people like you. Chicks dig you. Most important, you have a support system that's genuinely supportive. It breaks my heart that you won't see the evidence of that last for another two years, and then because of why you see it you won't believe it even then. But it's still true, and they can keep you going through the worst of what's to come.
Finally, you are a damn fine writer. I'm not just saying that because the competition up to now has been crap: you are, genuinely, a good writer. You can make something of this, regardless of how many times your mother says "that's nice but how are you going to put food on the table?" So, for the love of god, stick with it and write more. Write fragments and beginnings, and show them to your friends, and when they say "cool! so what happens next?" (as they will), keep writing.
There's plenty of other advice I could give you: take real Computer Science instead of Computer Science For Idiots; trade orchestra for drama; don't invite JMH to join Troupe next year, since he's secretly a first-rate jerk. That stuff doesn't really matter, though. If you'll just start ignoring your parents, trusting your (non-JMH) friends and yourself, and writing more, you'll do fine.
Although, honestly? You'll turn out fine anyway. This will just help you get there a little sooner, and maybe with fewer scars along the way. I'd tell you about it, but you'd never believe me.
Love,
thirty-four-year-old Tucker
PS: If you're thinking about kissing her, stop thinking and kiss her already. You'll be wrong maybe twice in the next four years, and it will be totally worth it. --T.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 08:36 pm (UTC)To take just one example, they've told you, over and over, "You're good enough to be anything you want to be." That's a trap. Two traps, even. You can see one of them even if you can't verbalize it yet: you don't know how to find out what you want. The reason you can't find out what you want is the other trap: the unspoken "As long as what you want isn't something we disapprove of."
Fuck them.
You're good enough to do anything you want, you're good enough to make a living doing anything you want, and you're good enough to want anything you want. Full stop.
Learning to want things for yourself is really bloody hard. It's harder when the two most important people in your life are telling you that everything you want for yourself is wrong. You're going to spend the next dozen years just learning that it's okay and even good to want things for yourself, and then at least another ten figuring out what those things are.
Light bulb. I'm not quite there yet. I'd appreciate talking with you some time about how you learned this.
I really admire everyone who's writing these things. Too difficult for me, still. But with each one I read I get a bit closer to figuring it out.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 09:18 pm (UTC)I'd be quite happy to talk about it but I don't know how useful I'll be. It's been a years-long accretion of a bunch of things, plus sessions with Izolda. Back when I was trying to decide what to go to college for, I started hearing "you can do anything you put your mind to." Since the only time I'd ever told my parents what I wanted to do was "i want to be a writer" and that was met with derision, being told I could do anything I wanted caused some serious cognitive dissonance. Engineering turned out to be an acceptable "anything" but I didn't know why. I was firmly convinced I'd come up with it all on my own.
Most recently, that horrid Amy Chua piece on Asian Mothers took up a disproportionate amount of my mental energy. I wasn't really raised like that, but it still all sounded way too familiar. Then someone somewhere wrote in response, "her method is really good at extrinsic motivation, doing things because someone else wants you to. that's probably why the burnout and suicide rates are so high among college students who were raised like that: they get someplace without the parental stick or carrot and they go to pieces. i'm much more interested in intrinsic motivation." And, bam. That was the piece I'd been missing. Being given the freedom to do anything didn't matter when the only "anything" that was worthwhile was the "anything" my parents approved of.
Up until fairly recently I literally didn't know how to want things that weren't immediately available. I'm still not very good at it. Edit: and of course, the corollary: learning that not getting something I want is not the end of the world, and learning the difference between "not now" and "not ever."
And, like I said, I really would be happy to talk about this (or most anything else) sometime.
I really admire everyone who's writing these things. Too difficult for me, still. But with each one I read I get a bit closer to figuring it out.
oog. I wrote most of this (plus about twice as much that I deleted or edited way down) yesterday, and it put me in a seriously depressed headspace. Not someplace I want to spend any more of my life. Luckily I don't have to.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 09:41 pm (UTC)I tend to put most things away. When I first mentioned the video to one close friend, he suggested I might want to try the exercise. He wanted me, though, to tell him if I did. Not to show him, but to tell him.
I suspect he worries that actually spending the time to think on such things, to process, might make me extra vulnerable, as I in general never do.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-12 03:25 pm (UTC)And, I had not gotten around to watching the dueling cellos, but now I have. That was fairly awesome, and thank you!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 09:02 pm (UTC)Were we in orchestra together?? I seriously can't remember most of my TJ life...
Congrats to you and your lady on your nuptials!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 09:28 pm (UTC)The stuff with my parents was the root cause at the time, but it was buried pretty deep. I don't think I could have told anyone what was going on with me: I genuinely didn't know. It all came out in being afraid of other things: of losing my friends by doing something stupid, of doing anything that might hurt someone else, of saying "this is what i want, even though it might not be what you want" (for any value of 'you' there might be).
I played cello in the less-good orchestra freshman year (me and Martin Holt and Jeremy Sher), and very briefly junior year. You were... viola? Violin?
And, thank you. :)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-14 12:57 am (UTC)I played violin in the orchestra, and then viola in some chamber group. The orchestra teachers I had kept moving me to other instruments when they needed an extra bassist or whatever. I remember Jeremy Sher, I think...was he sort of a jerk?
no subject
Date: 2011-02-14 08:56 pm (UTC)I can see where being pigeonholed into one's high school persona would be frustrating. Kind of like trying to deal with one's parents as an adult when they won't see one as anything other than a teenager at best. The 10-year Jefferson reunion was a little like that, too. Interesting mostly for how people hadn't changed in the aggregate. All the old social clumping, all the old patterns, still in place. Ick.
I thought of Jeremy Sher as more of a dork than a jerk, myself. Some days it can be hard to tell the difference.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 09:04 pm (UTC)That just went into my quotes file, as advice to remember.
~Sor
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 09:31 pm (UTC)Learning how to want things is the hardest thing I have ever had to learn, and I'm nowhere near as good at it as I want to be. (heh.)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 10:16 pm (UTC)It's not that I don't remember that time, I do. But no part of the adult me that would form was ready to be addressed (if that makes sense). I was still a child and still belonged to my younger years. There are shades of things to come in there, but they're half-formed and unready to be brought to light.
I may, however, do one to my nineteen year old self. HE could have used the advice much better...
no subject
Date: 2011-02-12 01:58 pm (UTC)I don't know how to say anything so he'd hear it, but I wish someone had figured out a way to.
(I think the age at which I start being able to do something useful with advice, beyond the prosaic 'do X instead of Y,' is roughly twenty-four. At best.)