How Do You Tell a Teenager?

It's an old joke, and the answer is, "You can't tell a teen anything"

In my experience, if you want to tell a young person something, it is best to put them into a position of thinking they learned it for themselves. Come to think of it, it works for adults too. 

I have jokingly told those who know of my love of learning "I can't decide what to do when I grow up". Lately this has become a question with a much more serious answer. I relate to teenagers very well these days.

It may be the most futile desire ever, but one of the wishes I had starting this blog was to be able to send letters across the years to my child self, a lonely kid who learned to become very self-reliant but also self-abusive in response to the constant pushing and poking to satisfy the needs of the adults around him. 

Those adults were afraid for the kid. I found out the sort of thinking that had gone on in a heart-to-heart with my grandmother a few years before she passed away:  

"We thought you might 'become a homosexual' if we didn't get you away from all those girls you played with." 

I look back and think how misguided that sort of thinking was from so many points of view, while also recognizing with sadness how characteristic that sort of thinking was in the 1950's. I often wonder sixty years from now what people will say of the 2010's and our primitive thinking.

If I could meet with the fifteen year old me in dreamtime, what sort of case could I make for turning away from the internalized pressures to recognize and harness suppressed feelings? How could I explain that everything important he would do while living that pretend life; marriage, children, career, friends, all of it would simply make it harder to recover and honour the real person, and having found her, to then do something to correct the birth defect? How could I get across how futile and wrong it is to work so hard escaping from yourself?

It would take some pretty fancy planning to come up with a way to have that teenaged me think those first thoughts to defy every voice but the one he learned to hate the most, the one inside; to ignore the danger he has been taught to believe exists in that voice and turn it around. I want to yell at that stupid brilliant hurting kid I was "Rebel damn you! Stupid teenager who didn't ever rebel!!"

Some days I would like to say damn you stupid person who has never grown up or rebelled! to the person in the mirror, but it seems life has already tried to do that. Instead, what I am doing now is taking what all the normal people around me see as my blessings, marriage, children and all, and finding a way to live as honestly as chemical intervention and goodwill can allow.

Every person has regrets at my age. They can all look back at events they would handle differently. I have lots of 'normal' regrets. This feels different. This is one of those 'this should never happen to someone else' regrets. It is a feeling that somehow it should be a life mission to find a way to help anyone I can to run that gauntlet (for we cannot avoid pain or hard choice no matter what the rest of the world is like), and live their life authentically.

I will admit being afraid to take steps to use what I know in the here and now to help young trans-people. It would mean outing myself, even though I have no intention of transitioning. The reason I won't take those steps is the very same reason I haven't transitioned in fact.