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Being 14-15 Means . . .

"Where Am I?"

You're in the ninth grade and you suddenly feel lost. You have been pulled up by your roots. Now, all day long, you go around looking for signs to point the way, especially when you used to know where you were supposed to be. But wait a second. Here you are, set down on a new, heretofore unexplored planet—high school—with a bunch of strangers. They've given you a course schedule and a map of the campus, but where is your survival manual?

You worry about lunch. Help! How are you going to get through lunch? Who will eat lunch with you? Should you make the first move? When did eating a stupid sandwich become so intense, and how come lunch has so little to do with food? Maybe you should just skip lunch altogether.

You are wondering, gee, you know, about, guess you'd have to say . . . SEX! (I have no idea what it is, I don't even know the questions, are you talking to me, oh, OK, never mind. But I still might try it.)

You are looking into the mirror more than you care to admit and more than you even realize. The escalating, complicating, enriching, exhausting self-consciousness!

You are adjusting to revised and intensified expectations all around: schoolwork, sports, drama, art, community service. And of course these expectations bring along a host of corresponding emotions, such as excitement, anxiety, anticipation, ambition, fearfulness, remorse, hopefulness, usually several in combination.

You feel mystified lots of the time. (By comparison with the ordinary fifteen-year-old, the paranoiac conspiracies infusing science fiction will seem tame. Ninth graders doubt themselves as well as their perceptions and conceptions of reality. Exactly what is going on? Is it even possible to find out? Whom should they ask?)

You are struggling all day long to establish priorities in your own life—academics, athletics, family, personal, spiritual, and religious. Whose priorities rule? Is it OK if they're only your priorities?

You are always asking yourself questions like, What am I supposed to wear? Are you supposed to care about what you are supposed to wear? But you have to dress in some way, right, so how to look?

For just about every teenager, the trauma of starting high school—or to view it from the related, equally valid perspective of leaving eighth grade—is difficult to overestimate. Yes, they know there is nothing left to learn, conquer, or endure in middle school, but that recognition only increases a ninth grader's sadness. And sadness it is, too, which can be overwhelming and poignant. Now they are compelled to make this dramatic transition. As they are doing so, they feel simultaneously banished from the old world they had labored to master and (talk about unfair) systematically excluded from a new one they aspire to enter.

By that first month of high school, teenagers are a perpetual heartbeat away from exhilaration, from tears, from laughter, from hyperventilation, from anger. The causes of any emotional reaction may not quite be clear to anybody, including themselves. A mere look from a classmate or a teacher can send them spiraling into depression or uplift them into the most rarefied realms of bliss. At home, there will be unaccountable mood swings. In their classes, they will strike their teachers in one moment as behaving like uncontrollable children and in the next impress them as being incredibly sophisticated "for their age." They will make tremendous strides intellectually, challenging adults with their honest questionings and strivings to understand. But they will also inexhaustibly ferret out the humorous potentialities, for example, in even the most oblique references to natural bodily functionings. They will thrill to the prospect of making new friends, of expanding their social world, even as some will cling to the cliques that they form as a buttress against the unknown. Still others will victimize their peers and find themselves victimized at the same time. Adults will be tempted to shake their heads, incredulous as to how kids can be so mean to each other or so dependent on each other, having momentarily forgotten that they all endured the same ordeal or perpetuated the same cruel survival strategies.

This is a time when kids require the clear voice and steady support of adults—parents, teachers, coaches—who establish boundaries that are reasonable and explained. That's because the whole year seems so confusing, and life seems played out on somebody else's terms. Their bodies aren't linked up with their minds yet. Classes don't seem to be aligned with their intellectual priorities—and how can they be, since these priorities continually skid and slide around? Some people, including members of their own family, don't quite yet understand or appreciate who they are or who they are trying to be.

Well, what else would you expect? They don't know either.

All this to say this year is a time when tact on the part of adults is most poignantly called for. In one moment, these teenagers will need to be treated almost as if they were still children—somewhat needy, dependent, and incorrigibly playful. Yet in the next moment, they will insist on being treated like proto-adults, wanting freedom and responsibility. Only at our own peril do we discount such a claim. Sometimes they will need to be treated with the formality and respect accorded a state dignitary, other times, extended all the patience and understanding that can be summoned up for a teething infant. (Try to manage that attitude without condescension. Lots of luck.) We do best by them when we hold them to reasonable expectations and patiently embrace them in our sympathetic understanding. The truth is, of course, new to their teenager identity, they are both children and adults, and both totally as well as provisionally.

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