On Being a Teen, part I

Being a teenager was hard.  I won't begin to say otherwise.  I had very different worldviews than either of my parents and my mother (bless her heart) to this day is a complete enigma.  I also was desperately afraid  of romance and males in any capacity other than the strictly platonic kind.  Part of it was the pressure associated with relationships, part of it was my fierce independence (see how I can make it sound so empowered?  ha!), part was due to trauma associated with a series of random awful events involving the opposite gender.  A lot of it was not wanting to answer to anybody.

---I'm sorry, I just have to stop for a second.  As I type this, I'm laying next to my husband, who is fast asleep and giggling happily.  Very strange to be jolted back to the present after trying to explain my past, if only to myself, and to find myself *so pleased* with the fact I got married at 21.--

Right, back to trying to explain my actions as a teen. I felt like I couldn't relate to most people around me, which I'm assured is par for the course, but I felt particularly lonely and particularly private.  OH.  Getting ahead of myself.  Still talking about boys.  Yeah, terrifying.  I could have a pretty decent friendship with a male peer until they said anything that could be construed as even remotely flirty by even the most paranoid of individuals (me), and I kind of turned into a mean person.  I got awkward.  I made sarcastic comments.  I actively sabotaged.  I wanted nothing to do with them.  I flat refused to go on most dates and when I did, I insisted on not liking the guy.  WOO! Damage! Relationships are and were scary.  I saw tons of people who were getting married quickly and ruining their lives in my opinion.  I got really uncomfortable in church when emphasis was put on finding your future priesthood holder.  I didn't want any of it.  I wanted to be alone.  I wanted to live for myself.  I didn't want the relationship I perceived many people around me having, not that there's anything wrong with them in retrospect.

  This is going to be a bit painful, but I found refuge in the internet.  Not in online dating or anything even remotely of the sort, but I trolled the internet for debate and found groups of people I identified with, who I found intellectually stimulating, who I could associate with regardless of whether they happened to flirt, whether I felt well, whether my mother felt like letting me go out, and they had such different worldviews than anybody else I knew.  They were from all over and had opinions and thoughts I'd never heard before.  Some of these people grew to become my friends and I developed some of the best friendships of my life so far.

ANYWAY.  It might not come as a surprise that despite all of this, I still had the regular teenage makeup.  Still having heart jumpy feelings upon watching romcoms, the whole bit, and sometimes I even developed some feelings for a far away friend or two, because they felt safe!

I know it's taboo to talk about friends on the internet, let alone to have them, but coming up on ten years down the road in some of these friendships and they're still some of the best I've ever had.   A perk of growing up is that I've been able to spent quite a bit of quality time in person with these same people.  They are still awesome.  It actually annoys me a bit that I'm a little embarrassed to talk about this, simply because it's 2012 and seriously, some of the best, most supportive people in my life, people who got me through my teens, were originally happened upon on the big scary internet.  These people (mostly in a community--so everybody knew each other) helped make me into a better person than I ever could have been otherwise.  Not saying that I'm awesome now, but I definitely could have been a lot worse.

This is so rambly.  I will stop now.