my manifesto for the evening; clasp your hands and sing.

[aamcnamara]

(No, I still haven't written on the novel. That's my next task. People keep asking me good questions!)
(This is related to my previous post.)

mrissa asked me here about my strong identification as a teenager, and whether I thought it was personal or something generational.

I got a little off-topic--short answer: I think it's mostly personal--and it turned into an interesting introspective thing for me, so I'm posting it here and linking in a comment.

This is my answer.

I have always wanted to be taken as an equal by the people I look up to.

Part of that has been wanting to grow up, already, so that I can be an adult. But part of that is also knowing that I can't hurry time, and that people know I am young, and that I want to be a part of the community now. And I don't want to be a part of the community on false pretenses, even if I could get in that way, because that feels like lying, and to be a member of the community you have to tell the truth.

And it's all mixed up with the times when people have thought I'm stupid or lying because I'm a kid, and my righteous anger to show them that kids (and teens) are in fact smarter than you realize, sharper than you think, and will not let you off so easy this time. And with having chosen to go from homeschooling to school with my age-peers, rather than skipping grade after grade to find somewhere the academics were challenging, because I wanted to have friends.

In other words, I think it's probably a personal difference [between me and mrissa on this subject], but in any case, thanks for the opportunity to think about just why I have that strong belief. It'll be interesting to see what happens when I am not, in fact, a teenager any more. (If every generation does this, maybe I understand more about how older generations of fans act than I thought I did.)

[Related to shadesong's post: In general, though, I think that today's generation of fans can find more geeky friends--it's more okay to be geeky in a lot more places today, and there's also the Internet--which allows them to own their geek pride, but at the same time, there's no getting around the fact that they're teens; and sometimes the adult programming just doesn't give teens what they want. Often, perhaps.]

Comments

[snurri.livejournal.com]

I still think of myself as too young to be taken seriously, sometimes. And I know that the same thing made me insane when I was much, much younger.

I think perhaps it has to do with being above average intelligence-wise--wish I could put it in a less full-of-myself way, but I'm talking about you as well so maybe that gives me a pass. With being underestimated because the default assumption is that you are only as worthwhile as the next teen, and then being doubly annoyed because you can see that the next teen has something to offer too, if anyone would give them the time and space to articulate it.

And at this point I'm not sure this comment makes sense. Anyway, yeah. And I want you in my community, 'cause you're sharp.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See, and I did skip a grade. Just the one--and then I got to college and made friends with people two college years ahead of me, so three calendar years ahead of me. I skipped a grade and had friends--and when people acted like I wouldn't, I treated them as dangerous lunatics. (Dangerous particularly because they might have influence over people who could control bits of my life.)

What I wanted when I was 20 was not for people to mistake me for 25 or 28 but for people to treat a 20-year-old as part of the indistinguishable mass labeled "people who can carry on interesting conversations." (See also: when I was 12; now that I'm almost-31.) And I think that a lot of the things that were particular about being 20 for me will not be the same as the ones that will be particular about being 20 for you, because they were less about being 20 and more about having been born in 1978.

It was important to me to make an audience largely composed of Baby Boomers wince in unison once when I was on a panel talking about science fiction and space travel by saying that human beings had not walked on the moon in my lifetime--because there I was, a fully adult person saying that. It was a perspective shift I felt they needed. They needed to know that someone in my position could remember Challenger but had no chance whatsoever of remembering a lunar landing because it was not physically possible for me to remember that. That set of markers, whatever they are, will vary substantially with time--dealing with one group of 20-year-olds will not teach you how to deal with the next one 2 or 4 or 10 or 15 years later, wherever the line of change goes. Obviously there are things like going to college, or having a settled job if you're going to, or having a child or children if you're going to, that are difficult and uncommon to do outside a particular age range. But I have friends in college and friends who have children in college, so those parts of age-markers have just not been a major deciding factor for my friendships. And also possibly some of this is that you were homeschooled for awhile and I never was: I never felt a shortage of people my own age. At all. I felt like I was being surrounded with people my own age, suffocated by people my own age, so the idea that I would need some time to just be around people my own age never computed for me.

(I hope it's clear that when I say "this is what I wanted" or "this is how I aligned my identity," I'm not saying "and you should do the same," I'm saying, "Huh, I think this is a difference I've spotted that might be interesting to discuss.")

I have also experienced programming chairs who suit me better and worse, and I have not noticed an age-correlation with that. Which is not to say that you're not noticing one--but I do think that there are people I know who are in their 60s who would like to hear some of the teen-related discussions you've mentioned over on shadesong's lj, and some who are in their teens or twenties who would Really Rather Not. I particularly fear that a teen track is not likely to be very well suited to you personally because you self-identify as book fandom not media fandom, and what I have seen of "what teens like/making more teen-friendly programming" has inclined very heavily towards the "MORE ANIME!" school of programming. And not because of lack of teen influence, either.

[ckd]

I found this post really interesting, because of what I remember of my teen years (and I'm not quite so old and decrepit as to have completely forgotten them) I see similarities to both your experiences and mrissa's in various ways.

I had way too many "OH HAI KIDDO U R SO CUTE WHEN U TRY TO TALK" moments when I was younger, made worse by the fact that I had a pretty young-looking face even for my age, so your righteous anger sounds familiar. On the other side, once I got to college and was participating on various mailing lists and newsgroups I had people mistaking me for a postdoc when I was still a teenaged undergraduate...not because I was trying to be deceptive, but because what they saw of me was distilled down to my ability with written communication and that was something I was good at.

The grade/age discussion (where you stuck with age-peers and mrissa skipped a grade) is particularly amusing, because I skipped 1st grade, repeated 3rd grade to get back into a group of my age-peers, bumped up a couple of grades (but just in math) starting in 6th grade, and eventually started a year in 9th grade and ended it in 11th.

I may or may not be one of the people you look up to (I suspect not, actually) but based on what I'm seeing from you in this discussion I'd take you as at least an equal.