Self-doubting, sad, mad and at times bad

Reading through my diaries has told me so much. Including, just hard how hard it is to be a teenager.  They seem so full of adolescent angst. That actually does not seem to stop even as I entered my late teens. Interspersed with total annoyance of my self-obsession there is also growing compassion for the younger me. 

Most adults don’t realise just how helpless the young are. Many, many entries in my diaries concerned missing the school bus from Limavady to Dungiven where I lived. This was totally outside my control as teachers would invariably keep the class in until I missed the last bus available to me. I ended up racing across the school playground desperately trying to catch the departing bus. Many times I took risks racing across the road to get the waiting bus before it departed. On one occasion I was hit by a car and ended up being flung across the road onto the pavement. The thing that upsets me now over 40 years later is there was absolutely nothing I could do about the situation.  There was no other bus and I had no choice.

There was also a boring self-preoccupation and self-consciousness that appears throughout all the diaries. Recording my weight was a weekly affair carefully recorded in capitals. So what reflections do I have on all these diaries so far.

Listen to the young. Hear their despair. It is real and it is potent. Every single adult who took time to show kindness and a listening ear was a game-changer. If you knew the anguish and self-doubt most teenagers are consumed with you would understand so much more about their behaviour and mindset. Don’t be in a hurry to judge and if they have nine bad qualities and one good be sure to tell them about that one vital quality that they have acquired.

There are a few exerts from my dairies that give a flavour of those intense days.

My first desired career was as a forester.  I couldn’t because I was a girl (I was told).  But I kept the leaflet.  Still there over forty years later.

Boredom was a perennial enemy as this entry indicates.

June 21 

“Today is Monday and today was just a normal boring Monday. Nothing happened, nothing exciting was said and nothing exciting was done. I am boring person in a boring life in a boring place.”

This discovery is rather confirmed by the following entry.

June 26,
“Did a lot of stamp arranging. I evaluated my stamps. It’s a nuisance. I want to stick a lot in but I have no stamp hinges.”

The tragedy of no stamp hinges, does life get any worse?  However, the obsession with my awful appearance was never-ending and often focused on odd parts of my anatomy I am wondering how I managed to spot my disfigurement from behind.  This entry was typical.

27^th  January 

“I am too fat. It’s a horrible thing to realise but it’s a fact. My legs are horrible. They have no shape and at the back they are positively repulsive. We went down the river in the boat. I lay out like a bloated balloon in my swimming costume. Got back just before 8 o’clock.”

Despair was evident at times and dramatically spoken of.

Feb 15 

“There comes a time when your pit of hope just runs out and you quit. You just decide you’re not going to be hurt anymore and stop caring.”

There were some successes.  After playing chess with only my brother for years my mum entered me in a chess competition for girls and I won and played for the Irish team in international competitions.  I remember feeling less useless but also being freaked out by the stress of competitive chess. I stuck the newspaper cutting in my diary and my shyness is evident.

One entry consists of my writing Dam in capitals for the entire 20 lines available for that particular date.  Another has every bad word I could summon up and each is scribbled over the top of the others.  I suspect much of adolescent life is like this.  Full of self-doubt, being really sad at times, really mad quite often, self-critical to an appalling degree, occasionally really happy and often totally bored during it all.