Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
To be honest, I don’t regard myself as an angst-ridden teenager.
The concept of your teenage years as ones being frequented by torment seems to be more of a cliché employed by Hollywood high school dramas and half-rate housewife novels rather than an accurate description of the vast collection of 13- to 18-year-olds.
According to the cliché my life should be an extensive list of few ups, mostly downs and a couple of in betweens. My raging hormones should mean I have trouble keeping my clothes on while my vocabulary shouldn’t extend far beyond the use of f*** and s***. I should really be a dark angry adolescent with a penchant for black eye-liner (non-waterproof of course, so that people can see the tear stains) with a tendency to spew out melancholy poetry on my weblog. But, quite frankly I’m not. I’d rather listen to Cat Stevens or José Gonzalez than the likes of Slipknot and preoccupation with university applications and exams means boys and boyfriends aren’t given the slightest thought — all right, perhaps a miniscule, hardly-worth-mentioning thought.
I might also have to admit that at times I may be prone to angry rants when my mascara goes missing from my make-up bag, which is blamed on an older sister but later found underneath a biology textbook, and that stresses with school and family occasionally hazard a quick cry when it all gets too much, but nothing to the extremes that Hollywood and those long-past teenage seem to think. Overall I’d like to think I’m quite happy, quite nice and oh-so-slightly angst ridden.
Every teenager has something to fret about and most adults would be surprised to learn that they might actually — just possibly — go beyond the traditional teenage anguish causing issues like boys and school. For me, it’s my asinine apprehension that in old age I would become a lonesome wizened spinster who nobody would notice the death of, until the stench of rotting human material seeps through the floorboards and through to the flat below. And that nobody would care about my death apart from getting rid of ‘the disgusting smell!’ courtesy of my decaying body.
It’s either that, or getting eaten alive by my hundreds of cats when my pension can’t cover the cat food bills. But for now, the biggest worry is that no one from school will read this. Pseudonym, please?
