A premature-maturity is something I never asked to possess and yet here I am, doing all the superficial old-lady things that are only tokens of how old I feel - you know, drinking tea, reading poetry, knitting, liking cats and Magic 1278, stupid stuff like that.
Going back through my old diaries makes me realise the limbo I've gotten myself into. Living like, and being largely treated as, an adult for the majority of my childhood has, while encouraging articulation and eloquence and the ability to comment on whether or not Julia Gillard is an embarrassing representative for Australia to the world, created an unfortunate explosion of conflict when normal teenage tendencies take hold. I'm caught between recognising and detesting the headiness of self hatred for what it is - self indulgent, pointless teen angst - and contriving a cocktail of emotional bullshit to write emotional love songs and poetry about, as in, things that no-one actually cares about. That's the teenager in me, I guess. She's pretty ugly sometimes but in saying that, she's worth having around.
My old diaries hold such gems as The Shawshank Redemption's Brooks' entire letter back to the prison which I transcribed myself and horrific short stories about The Beatles and pages upon pages upon pages of 'Get skinny!' and 'I love him! I hate him! I love him! I hate me! I hate everyone!' and 'Only MUSIC gets me!'
I laugh about it now, which is nice, and is something I actually wrote about when I was thirteen (although my thirteen year old self expected to only be able to laugh about this stuff by the time I was 30 at the earliest). Knowing that all this silliness was transcendental and ephemeral and really just so common and all that has made me get all nostalgic about being so SERIOUS all the time, trying to both suffocate and revive the teenager inside of me. Now that I'm finishing high school and am about to be released into the 'real world' I'm not sure if I can keep that dying little bit of naive teenager alive. Because truth be told, I kind of prefer that side of me, the side of me that doesn't know anything, or follows her instincts, or listens to warnings - the side that trusts blindly and acts and reacts ridiculously. It's the side that can hate me so much, and so specifically ('when you tuck your t-shirt into your jeans you look like a midlife crisis'), but it's also the side that soars upon the impossible heights of happiness, that cries in sad movies and turns my otherwise 'whatever' singing voice into a scream, or a wail, or a bird.
On a completely unrelated note the above screenshots are all from Atonement because it is pretty and I like pretty things.




No comments:
Post a Comment