Looking back, as I was a teenager, I can only remember that I was angry at all times.
It’s not just hormones. Mostly it was a feeling of helplessness, a feeling of wanting to understand something: the world and how it works, but having no guidance. A feeling of wanting to be understood, but no one understands you. And as a teenager, your words were mostly underestimated. The adults thought you are not yet worthy to talk serious things with them.
Also in my case, there was a case of trying to fit in. For example, helping my friends cheated during exam, because of a feeling of wanting to feel accepted as part of a group. Wanting to be accepted was a normal thing as a human to feel. After all, we are a social being. But as a teenager, the friends at school were all the friends that I had. Being accepted by them is put on a pedestal of importance.
There was also another thing back when I was a teenager. First of all, disclaimer, I acted very goofily and stupidly (until now actually lmao), probably like an autistic person. And actually, even undiagnosed, I believe I am somewhat in that spectrum. Maybe between 1 and 10, I am at 2 or 3. That other thing when I was a teenager, was that I didn’t have a lot of friends to choose. My class consisted of 17 people. And I was one of the uncool ones. I didn’t know any new trend, I know nothing about brands, I know nothing about cars, all because first of all I was not rich. And then at that time I really didn’t care about those things at all. But because of that, I was not a part of the “cool” friends, but somehow they could still bear with me because of my academic excellence. Because I was uncool, I wanted to be part of that group so much, to be seen as “cool.” Then I tried to fit in. By doing the stupid things they did, although some of them were fun, I also did miserable things, for example when that time I was asked to be invited to someone’s sweet 17 party but I was not actually invited.
“WHY THE HECK DID I DO THAT?”
But through all of those mental challenges in the past, now I build my own personality. From seeing how people underestimate timid people, I know learn to be assertive. By seeing how people more often than not take for granted a nice but weak person, I choose to be strong. By seeing other things, I learned from them and choose on how I should become. I imagined myself as a robot learning things to acquire. And since I had become all those person, now I am a very “chameleony” person. Let’s say I could act. I could pretend to be someone I’m not, although I always kept my core values intact. Yeah, if you’re reading this and you know me, I think you know what my values are as a person. What I say my values are are not important, the important thing is how I am in a real life and how I interact with you.
Sometimes I wish I could divide myself, then the other me would be responsible as an uncertified psychologist or counsellor at some school, then I would teach the students about life and how it works, having experienced it. Because with my empathetic nature, I would be awesome at that, and I had been told by my private students when I made a private course when I was in high school, that I was a very good teacher. As I understood, I was able to position myself as someone who didn’t understand the courses, I was able to do this to an almost perfect degree, and I would guide them to understand them with simple logics.
Goofythinker 