I Wrote a Love Scene at Age Eleven

I'm watching The Vampire Diaries. I'm not proud of it. It's not part of my Becoming journey. However, the thoughts it's making me have might be. As I watch this show about teenaged angst and emotions and love, I have the urge to roll my eyes, but I like to stop myself (mostly XD). The drama might seem melodramatic to me now, but it's not a bad portrayal of what might have resonated with me ten years ago.

I also recently watched The Outer Banks. Honestly, I can't think of anything good to say about that show. Oh, one of the main female characters isn't super skinny. She has a more "realistic" body type. There. There was something good.

The whole time I was watching that show, I kept thinking about how much I just couldn't care. I must just be way too old for this crap. A bunch of children run around and think all the adults are out to get them, and think they're Really Truly in Love, and that no one understands them, and that they're forced into making bad choices. It was so aggressively ridiculous that it almost crossed the line from "lol" into infuriating.

But the thing is, when you're fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you believe those things. You believe them really, truly, deeply. Now, y'all know I am not one of those "whatever you feel is true" types. There's Truth and it doesn't care about your feelings. Two plus two is going to keep being four no matter how upset that makes you.

But if someone comes up to you and says, with tears in his eyes, "I'm looking at two plus two, and I swear to you I see them equaling five," the right thing to do isn't to roll your eyes or tell him he's stupid or crazy or that he'll grow out of it one day. You need to understand why he thinks that. What is he seeing that's different from what you see? Where is the disconnect? What mathematical laws is he breaking without realizing?

If the math equation is actually the fact that all the adults are out to get him, that he's Really Truly in Love, that no one understands him, or that he's forced into making bad choices, there's a good chance he still isn't going to leave the conversation believing that the answer is four.

And, to be honest, I think that has to be okay.

I wrote a love scene between these two characters when I was in sixth grade. The characters were fourteen (and lived in maybe the mid-1700s). They finally kissed, and the boy character felt "passion." Not in a sexual way that would've been inappropriate for an eleven-year-old to write, but in an emotional way.

I showed the story to an adult, and the adult said said in a tone of disgust, "He's fourteen. He's too young to feel passion."

I was, myself, disgusted—and offended. I am to this day.

Who gets to say when someone is old enough to feel "passion"? Is not the person who feels the passion the ONLY authority on that? How dare an adult tell me that I couldn't understand passion or that my characters were too young to feel that strongly about each other?

I guess I understand where the adult was coming from, but I still disagree. The older you get, the bigger and deeper your emotional cup becomes. You're able to feel more and more deeply than you possibly could have when you were fourteen.

However, just because you can fit more into your adult emotional cup doesn't mean that the fourteen-year-old's cup isn't legitimately full.

I'm actually REALLY conflicted on this subject. On one hand, I feel like someone should punch the kids in the face and tell them they're wrong and to just zip it—mouth, heart, etc.—until they're, like, twenty. Stop ruining your life over crap that is literally not going to be important in the grand scheme of your life. On the other hand, the above personal anecdote. How DARE I start to become the very thing I set out to destroy? XD

I get that there's a healthy balance to be struck; I just don't know where it is. I tend to think it's...in the middle? XD I don't know. (I also remember, as a child, losing respect for adults and adult characters who were TOO taken in by teenage antics.)

It bothers me that I had such a condescending reaction to The Outer Banks. Granted, I think other shows and movies do a WAY better job of portraying the legitimacy of teenage emotional journeys, but, out of respect for my incredibly emotional and passionate eleven-to-eighteen-year-old self, I generally strive to take these things seriously.

It's why I do not laugh at kids when they tell me things that might seem "cute" or "funny" or "precocious" or any number of other things that make grownups laugh. It upset me so much to be laughed at as a little kid. It happened almost all the time. I have a mental list of people in my head who treated me respectfully, and I love them very much. (Bon, you’re on it.)

I know when I have teenaged kids, they're going to say things and feel things that I "know" to be ridiculous. But I really hope I still remember what it was like to be convicted of the legitimacy of my adolescent feelings. I don't know how to translate that into good parenting, but I hope at least remembering will be helpful.

...?

~Stephanie