[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
My granddaughter Katya, who is nineteen years old, is currently studying in Italy. She was born and raised in Russia, primarily in the Siberian city of Omsk, speaking Russian and living a Russian life. Her experience is not that of an American teenager, and yet her concerns speak to the universality of the challenges we’ve been discussing in this series of posts. Here is Katya on individuality and on some of the other issues we’ve been discussing:
One of my friends is bored by school. He wants to be an architect and all day long he draws plans for buildings and makes projections of model cities. But it’s complicated. On the one hand, he wants to build cities. On the other hand, he claims to dislike science and technology and even goes so far as to say that he can’t understand geometry. I wonder if he is trying to protect himself and protect his creativity by acting like he doesn’t like certain things and that he can’t do certain things. So, he jokes about his ability to concentrate, dresses oddly, and most of his classmates find him weird. To the world he looks lazy, but I’m sure it’s something else. He doesn’t pay much attention to anything except his own drawings and doesn’t seem to mind being isolated and something of an outcast.
Another friend also has a complicated story. From childhood, her mother told her that she was extremely bright and talented, which was true, and that she had huge potential and was superior to other people. At about the age of thirteen or fourteen, my friend started to become very difficult and very oppositional. She became a vegetarian, engaged in free love, and started taking drugs (and was also a passionate volunteer!). Her mother, who had praised her so much, washed her hands of her and stopped supporting her financially and emotionally. Now she is in a technical school (called “college” here, which is lower than “university”), and not at all making use of her great potential.
Another friend is very bright and creative. He’s a visual artist and a poet, he’s interested in philosophy and nature, he reads widely and he’s especially interested in Japanese culture, and he smokes a lot of weed. His main challenge is that he rejects everyone’s opinion, even those closest to him. His position seems to be “nobody touches me and I touch nobody.” He can’t tolerate criticism, and he refuses to believe that he is ever wrong. We did some artwork together and found the collaboration very successful, but our reactions to its reception were very different. I was afraid of the public reaction and he was dismissive of it. I maybe let criticism in too easily and maybe he defended himself from criticism too much.
In my own case, I have had my problems finding the recognition I crave. I never joined a group of friends and so never had the kind of recognition you get from being part of a group. I was always looking for just the right person to respond to my work and my thoughts, someone who respected me and whom I could respect. This may have been partly the case because I’ve always felt that I would be leaving this Russian environment to study elsewhere, many of my friends live in other countries, so maybe I’ve kept a certain distance all these years from my Russian peers. I’ve always been drawn to Italy and that’s where I’ll go to university. And, of course, Covid played a part in all of this. I think that when I change the conditions of my life and begin my university life in Italy, I’ll find the recognition I crave.
I have a younger friend who is a dancer. She is talented, passionate, and loves to shine, but she has very complicated and difficult relationships with her primary trainer. My friend is naturally a free spirit and is not doing well being told what to eat, how to do her hair, how to look, and how to live her life. When it comes to dance instruction, she can listen; but when it comes to how she should live, there she feels that her freedom is being stolen. This has caused her to lose motivation. Her mother has tried to intervene with the primary trainer but the trainer was quite manipulative and the situation did not improve. Now my friend has to decide if she wants to continue with dance, which she loves, knowing that she is going to encounter more people along the way who are as controlling, critical and manipulative as this trainer.
Speaking of dance, I use dance to help with my mood swings. Like most of my smart friends, who have many ups and downs even in a very short period of time, I experience a great many rapidly-changing moods in a day. This affects everything we do, from our interpersonal relationships to our ability to create. To deal with these mood swings, I open my playlist, start to dance, and repeat certain words in a ritualistic way. It is sort of a ceremony for me, it liberates emotions, and I feel calmer and better. I think this could work for other teens, too.
I think that all smart teens are looking for recognition and admiration, they are bothered by criticism and can even stop trying when they’re criticized, for better or worse they depend on the opinions of their peer group, and to gain recognition they can become flamboyant and engage in shocking activities so as to attract attention. This is all a learning process but a hard learning process, because there are so many emotions, so much self-analysis and self-questioning, so much hunting for the truth and trying to make sense of the world, so much adrenaline-seeking, and so much stubbornness as we try to take a stand and do things our own way.
[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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