Why do I write for teenagers?

As most people know, I have an MFA in writing for children and young adults. Most of us in this weird club with this highly specialized degree would agree that the question we get the most often is “Why do you write for teenagers?”

MFAs in writing are supposed to be serious business; often too serious, judging by the frequently mocking references to “MFA writing” in the serious literary community. So it seems counterintuitive to most folks to bother paying all that money and doing all that work to get fancy letters behind your name that are all about making up stories for obnoxious, self-centered kids. After all, that’s not very serious is it? So truly, why bother? The reasons are always multi-faceted for all of us, yet our primary reasons differ from person to person. My primary answer is that I write for myself, as many writers would say. But I realize that at the heart of my Self, that is, the adult adaptation of my soul, is teenage me. And dealing with that is the most serious (and often painful) business I could possibly invest myself in.

I’m lucky enough to have gotten to watch the development of significantly younger cousins and, most closely, my own brother, from infancy to adulthood. In my observation of these people, we are mostly born who we are. Yes, we significantly mature and develop our unique personal qualities. Or they can be adulterated by pain or abuse, walls can go up as a result of loss or trauma, deflections and disguises often become a part of our everyday survival. But inherent in those words—wall, deflect, disguise—is the indication that the something that lies beyond is what it has always been and always will be.

So what’s so special about adolescence, if I am who I’ve always been? I think it has to do with a kind of Self consciousness you lack as a young child. Young children look out a window, so to speak—they are watching and absorbing, molding themselves to fit their familial and cultural expectations with very little regard for themselves as an individual. Ask a typical five-year-old seriously who they think they are and they’ll likely simply tell you their name. That’s the only identifying factor that matters much at this age. They are who they are, but that is of little importance to them. But ask a teenager who they think they really are and you’ll get a deer in headlights look, a terror of being revealed.

Teens stop looking out the window and become, developmentally appropriately, what adults often condescendingly refer to as “navel gazers”. They start spending tons of time literally and figuratively looking at themselves, as they were born and shaped, in the mirror. What do people see when they see me? What do I see when I see me? Does it measure up? Is it good enough?

And I say, try though we may to bury it deeply, to hide it, ignore it, and laugh at it, the unique brand of pain that comes with facing those questions on a daily basis shapes everything about who we are and who we become in the six or seven decades of our lives after adolescence.

Yes, we grow up. We get more comfortable in our skin. If we’re lucky, we learn to accept compliments with grace, we put less stock in our physical appearance, we embrace our talents despite continued struggle to fully actualize them. But underneath that, underneath all of that, something remains.

Recently, my dear friend posted this picture from my senior prom on Facebook. Yep, that's me in back, the brunette with the 'I'm forcing this smile right now' look on her face :

I’m so glad she posted it, I’ve been looking for it for ages! I wanted it for my author website someday, and you better believe I'll put it there! But looking at it was even more painful than I’d anticipated. At first I resorted to the defense mechanisms I refer to above—I ‘jokingly’ referred to myself as a huge loser. It was classic deflecting, the ‘call yourself something first so nobody has a chance to think it before you acknowledge it yourself’ move. I showed the photo to my husband, Matt.

“Come here!” I called. “Here’s that picture I’ve been wanting to show you!”

“What picture?” he asked, coming into the room.

“The group picture from my senior prom when I couldn’t get a date,” I tried to joke, but I started crying before I could even finish the sentence. I let a second pass.

“Wow,” I said. “I guess that stuff never, ever goes away, does it?”

Did it matter that I am now a reasonably confident grown woman happily married to a man who adores me beyond all reasonable expectation I may have a right to, and pregnant with his baby? That I'm happier and more fulfilled than I've ever been? Nope. Not to teenage me. Not to the me that still lives right there in the middle, constantly whispering to my subconscious all of the reasons that I don’t measure up. Will anything ever change her mind? She made the first decisions about my self worth, and friends, those decisions stick around.

As I continued to look at that picture, I remembered viscerally how that and other similar situations felt all through my junior high and high school years. “The worst part,” I told Matt, “was knowing that if I didn’t get in the picture, I was calling attention to myself. I was making everyone feel awkward and sorry for me. But if I did, I completely stuck out and looked like a loser. I was screwed either way. I felt like that all. the. time.”

Though my sweet friend’s sweet boyfriend who didn’t go to our school graciously stepped out of the picture so that she could be my “other,” it didn’t really change anything. I was still the defective one. I knew that there were rumors that I was a lesbian, that I was a little too close to my girl friends. I also knew there was nothing I could do to change it, even though it was so not true.

I had crushes on boys all the time, but the second they showed what maybe even could have been a glimmer of interest in return I would nearly have a panic attack. One time I actually did have a panic attack, shaking uncontrollably on the bathroom floor after a boy I liked dared to put his arm around me. In hindsight, I can see the damage that was done to me in my childhood and the strange and opposite way I chose to deal with it—where most girls hurt in the way I was may have become promiscuous, I became completely closed off when it came to even beginner-level intimacy with boys. A therapist I saw a few times called it “fascinating and unique” as a coping mechanism. But to teenage me at the time, I just felt like a freak. I didn’t know what my problem was, all I knew was that boys didn’t like me. In typical cruel and simplistic teenage fashion, this led to a self-judgment that I wasn’t worth much. And I was probably ugly.

So as an adult, am I kinder to myself? Of course I am. I don’t really believe those things (intellectually) anymore. For me, getting out of my small town and exploring the world, daring myself and taking those dares, was the psychological equivalent of getting out of the small, mean box I’d put my Self in and looking at what was really real about who I was. As I progressed through my twenties I became increasingly confident and self-aware, more and more willing to take on scary things as exciting challenges and open myself up to others, and much more able to deal with rejection and meanness and efficiently leave it outside of the box where I keep my self-worth. Overall, I’m pretty proud of who I am and who I’ve become. My external expression of that person could use some work, my efficiency leaves something to be desired (to put it kindly), but that’s an essay for another day.

But still. Teenage me exists. She controls more than I’d like her to. When a photo from thirteen years ago demonstrates its power to bring me to tears, I can’t forget that. So I remember anew that the most important reason I write for teenagers is that I write for her.

I write for her because like most adults, I try to bury her and lock her away. But: I’m always aware that just a tiny slight of her hand can act like a railroad switch—cause an alteration in judgment that is oh-so-easy to just not notice in the moment, though it may change the whole trajectory of my life.

I may not be able to get rid of her, but I cling to a stubborn belief that I can love her and teach her, maybe even help her heal. I have to believe that I can get her to understand that she wasn’t a loser at her senior prom, and she wasn’t the only senior that didn’t get a date. She was actually the only one with the guts to do what she wanted to do and go anyway, in her shimmery blue and purple snakeskin print dress she’d optimistically purchased months before. She was the beginning of the person who said yes I’ll go to Spain for a year even though no I don’t speak Spanish or know anyone there. Yes, I’ll go to California and work at that camp for the summer, sight unseen. Yep, I’ll transfer schools my senior year of college rather than go back to the school that made me miserable. Sure, I'll volunteer to translate Spanish to the best of my ability for total strangers at the free medical clinic. Absolutely, I’ll get an MFA in writing for kids, because I know that’s what I was born to do, even if it does mean bucking every single piece of conventional writing wisdom and taking out monster loans to do it.

Teen me was seriously awesome. She made the very first of my biggest, bravest choices without precedent to reassure her that it would turn out okay, even amazing. I’m going to keep writing the stories I need to tell to help her understand how awesome she is, until she gets it through her head. Is it futile? Maybe, but I have to try. Because when she gets that, that’s the last piece of the puzzle. That’s when I really get that, not just on the surface, but all the way through to the middle. It would be the truest kind of freedom there is. And then who knows what I'll be able to do?