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| Typography by Sherry Qian |
Originally published in Show & Tell Zine
I’ve always been a bit of a late bloomer. I was the flat-chested, stick-thin thirteen year old hoping beyond hope that I’d wake up one morning with boobs; the one who watched from the sidelines as all my friends started dating, the one who didn’t start wearing makeup until the tenth grade, the one who saw a concert for the first time last summer. I have this vivid memory of being about eleven or twelve and crying to my mom that I didn’t have a “best friend” like all the girls in movies did -- someone whose house I’d go over to all the time, or who would call me after school to gossip and chat about our lives. She told me it was just because of the school I was at, that most of my friends lived far away, that their parents were strict about when they could go out. She said that it would be better in High School.
Whether or not that particular conversation had much of an impact on me, I’ve heard the same thing expressed in various ways across various mediums for pretty much my entire life. High School. The big one. “The best four years of your life”. Yes, of course the universe doesn’t start and end with high school. There’s a whole world out there, and the idea that the four years you spend trying to get your shit together stuck in a building with a bunch of other sweaty, stressed-out, frightened teenagers will be the peak of an 80+ year lifespan is more than a little ridiculous. But if all we ever hear is “don’t worry, it’ll be better when you’re older” -- well, that’s the same advice I got when I was twelve: just wait. Just wait. Just wait. It’ll be better in high school, it’ll be better in university, it’ll be better once you graduate, it’ll be better when you’re dead. At what point is it too late?
I’m seventeen -- why haven’t I had my first kiss yet? Why haven’t I gotten drunk, or thrown a house party, or gone on a date, or a road trip, or skipped school, or snuck out of the house at night, or gone on any of the amazing adventures with a band of quirky misfits my 12-year-old self was sure I’d be having? When I was younger all I wanted to do was grow up. Now, with one year left of high school and less than three years left of being a teenager, I feel like I’m running out of time.
In my darker, self-pitying moments I attribute all of this to some personal fault of mine. Maybe I’m ugly or annoying and everybody hates me, or I’m too scared to take risks and do things that I could get in trouble for. Maybe I’m forever doomed to go through life without ever really doing anything because I’m a Boring Person. I feel like I’m missing out on some integral part of The Teen Experience™ that movies and books and TV shows have been selling me for so long, and as long as my life continues to be unexceptional, I’m plagued by the idea that I must be wasting it.
The problem with this type of thinking, however, is that it’s all wrapped up in expectation. If you’ve spent your whole life expecting that certain very specific things are going to happen to you at very specific times, it’s hardly surprising that you feel like a failure when they don’t. High school comes with a set of expectations, and so does University, and adulthood, and just about everything you’ll ever do -- and as long as I keep focusing on the things I haven’t done yet, I’ll forget about the things that I have. I may not have gone on a date yet, or been to a real “party”, but I have gone to New York, and ridden a horse, and seen Shakespeare in the park, and read a 1079 page novel, and I have absolutely no idea where life will take me next.
So when I worry about why I haven’t had my first kiss yet, or when I worry about whether or not I should take a gap year after high school, or when I worry that I’ll be missing out on something if I go to theatre school instead of university, or when I worry that if I do go to university it’ll be too late to go to theatre school afterwards, it’s because I expect that things always and only happen in one specific way. I was lucky enough to be accepted to a two-week theatre training program at the beginning of this summer, and the actress I was paired with there as my “artist-mentor” gave a me a really good piece of advice. She said that there’s no A + B = C pathway for being an actor. There’s no set of rules or any guarantee that if you do this or that thing, you’ll end up with one specific outcome. Anything you learn can be useful, whether it’s English lit or particle physics, because it’s all about figuring out who you are and what you want -- and this can apply to anything. Maybe it’s a cheesy notion, but that doesn’t stop it from being true. There’s no such thing as Too Late.
I suppose I could have had any of the stereotypical teen experiences I expected I would have in high school if I had forced them, but it probably would have felt worse to do things just for the sake of crossing them off of some kind of cosmic to-do list than to wait until things happened on their own. Sure, you shouldn’t just sit back and wait for things to happen to you, and yes it’s more than possible to be lazy, or mess up, or make the “wrong” choice, but dwelling on it isn’t going to change anything.
In the end, whatever happens happens. There aren’t any rules, there aren’t any guarantees, and I’m not going to force anything just for the sake of having done so. I don’t know what happens next any more than you do, but I can grit my teeth, make choices I believe in, and try my best to figure it out as I go along.
That’s all any of us can do, really.
