outgrowing angst
being a teenage dirtbag: online and irl, then and now
I think about all of the ways I've been awful— often.
Since I was a little girl, I have always been very aware of when I was being cruel. Perhaps not in the instant of infliction, but surely in some interval afterward. In the wake of every verbal altercation, I’d reckon with myself within the four walls of my room: holding remorse for the consequences of my cruelty, the form it may have taken, but never condemning the necessity (even when it was impulsive) to have let it live. For that would have been crueler than anything…crueler to me.
It was a skill of sorts, to know how to hurt people with words. It’s something I think a lot of young women adopt as compensation for a lack of physical power. It was a product of my own paranoia and an increasing awareness of the rational danger in the world that I began to wield language as a weapon to protect myself in practical ways.
One fantasy I remember having as a child was how I’d use quick wit to evade a blade and convince a hypothetical murderer to spare me. How I would manipulate a (imaginatively male) aggressor with the only violence I ever felt my small stature was capable of possessing: beauty, and brain enough to know how to use it.
My morbid tale reminds me of a story in Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir I am, I am, I am, where she fast-talks her way out of the grip of a serial strangler. He practically had her pinned up against death's door, weaving a binocular strap around her throat. She would have easily been his next victim, if only she had not known how to use it, how to speak.
It was only when I got to middle school that this sense of self-preservation began to bleed into the superficialities that characterize classic pre-teen problems. Survival at school posed different stakes: ridicule, rejection, social exclusion. In some effort of proactive self defense, I became a bully. A classic movie mean girl, and a good one at that; I was aware so acutely of the insecurities of others as to divert any suspicion that I possessed any myself. Though, looking at it now, even the threats in those days felt just as grave as life and death.
It’s heavy growing up a girl, in a way I find difficult to explain.
The first mistake you make is shattering the world’s image of you as delicate.As you begin to grow up and into the pretty face you’re praised for, you also begin to show signs of the presence of a secret, personal intensity. Any trace of any wildness threatens the world’s expectations of your complacency. It shatters the image of youth projected onto you, a dainty young lady: subtle, silent, subservient. People think they’ll be able to snake charm you forever, until you begin to grow into a viper (think Joanna in Near to the Wild Heart).
The first signs of rebellion in me as a teenage girl often only appeared publicly as viciousness. It was a safer self presentation than bearing the true underlying sensitivity I possessed. I was told I was sassy, feisty, fierce, even (uncomfortably) by my high school principal. Even then, the violence that stirred in me was trivialized.The parts of me that were curious, impassioned, and earnest only came to light in places they felt safe: my bedroom, my art, online. In the face of a world that already expected weakness from me, there was no way I’d submit myself even further into its scrutiny.
The most tragic parts of my girlhood—contrary to the prevailing narrative— actually had nothing to do with men. At least not directly. Budding feminist epiphanies aside, what wounded me the most in girlhood was realizing not that the patriarchy was pitted against me— but my heart. The same tenderness that brought me comfort in the most isolating times of my childhood wasn’t deemed a weakness, but worse. It was a strength undervalued, shunned.
The truth is, all my sharp edges originally emerged from somewhere soft: a sensitivity that I was told was too unseemly for the world I was growing older towards and becoming an autonomous part of. I felt like I had to defend myself somehow: with words, with venom. It was animal the way fear showed on my face as ferocity. I lived in a body constantly trying to be territorialized, of course my gentle sensibility wouldn’t be what I used to defend it.
Remarks that I was merely dramatic and attention seeking (namely from my mother) only enabled me further (though I forgive her now). Because although those things may too have been true, they weren’t getting at the source of where my evil came from—a place of vitality, sincerity even. Indulgence in my strong emotions, my ugly ones, may very well have been calls for attention. They were, in a way. But without yet growing into my emotional intelligence, I found the intensity of my heart's fervor difficult to articulate in the adult language of ‘I feel’ statements and understanding. All I knew was my little worlds online, at school, in the mirror. Kept contained, I was only bound to fester.
I know now that I wasn’t rotten, just confused. My meanness was a misdirection of passion, young and unbridled; hardly understood to myself‚ nonetheless by anyone else in my proximity.
I know now that I wasn’t rotten, just confused. My meanness was a misdirection of passion, young and unbridled; hardly understood to myself‚ nonetheless tamed by anyone else. I was an angsty pre-teen with a dead father, insecurities like anyone else, full of contradictions and excuses to be cynical.
I’m walking to the cinema to meet my boyfriend, caught in the tide of another disaffected day, floating through the world more like a ghost than a gust of wind. My knuckles are white, in a tight fist wrapped around a mini magic 8-ball chained to a keyring, shaking vigorously: will I ever outgrow my adolescence angst?
The bright blue, 20-sided regular icosahedron die inside the sphere swims in a sea of black ink and glitter, pressing up against the cheap plastic window to my fate. It reads: YOU’RE HOT.
I stifle a laugh in ironic disbelief, retreat my hand back into the pocket of my leather jacket, and carry on walking the streets of Central London. Under the oppressive light of another overcast day, the sight of cement everywhere and the excess of signs for rip-off souvenir stores make me feel justified in my disgust for all I see. On other, more level-headed days, the world might look more like a promise than a cesspit. Not today.
I’m dressed in resentment: douchebag attire with a disinterested face framed by sunglasses, despite any presence of the sun. Underneath, my eye-makeup is dark and smudgy, the black illuminating the lightness of my green eyes and lips pink and raw from being chewed on. My eye bags are as deep and dark as usual, not for lack of sleep but a genetic trait. I must have been born for grunge.
My headphones only add to my unapproachable air: booming dark, synthy sounds that are too niche to classify into one genre of music. I begin to imagine some standoffish scenario where one of those street interviewers approaches me to ask what kind of music I’m listening to. “Does it matter?”
It is a satisfyingly apathetic response. It is what the non-committal love interest would say in a fan-fiction. It is the essence of ‘anti-you’ and ‘whatever forever’ and ‘lonely-hearts club’ transparent PNGs. But in my mature mind, I know I’d never say it aloud.
The first sin I ever committed—before premarital sex or petty theft or even drugs—was emotional gluttony. Being angsty now, at my big age, feels holy as a self-indulgent old pleasure, even if most of it is only in my imagination.
The further away I get from being a teenager, the more I begin to find comfort in reverting to that form. It allows me to give into a kind of superficial suffering. One I knew all too well growing up, and that may have been a lot of things, but at the very least, never felt disingenuous.
It's a strange crossroads to finally be the same age of the people you once admired online. I used to reblog Tumblr posts of soft grunge girls in shredded tights holding lighters to their tongues when I was 13. Now I'm 20, smoking cigarettes myself and taking pictures in the same graffitied bathrooms that look like the ones that used to be my lock screen. I'm dating an older man (he’s only 23 lol) who writes me love letters reminiscent of the one I once had memorized from Alex Turner to Alexa Chung. I’m box-dying my hair, and dressing in Doc Martens, recounting underage partying stories that would put Effy Stonem to shame.
*tw // ed (briefly mentioned)
I’ve lived the motion of the pictures I once used to aspire towards. But what this also means is that I've lived what they’ve taught me. Knowing what I know now about the world, the anarchists and disordered eaters and arsonists of my time on Tumblr resonate maybe even more now.
My explore page permeated my pre-teen brain in a way that was both surface-level and deeply subconscious. Whatever emotional turmoil was stirring within me then was only vaguely connected to the aesthetics I admired online.
When I was younger, I didn’t understand the scope of political unrest and—by some miracle—didn’t find myself in the corners of the internet where thigh-gap discourse was all-consuming. For better or worse, I was impressionable enough to feel a magnetism towards what I saw online, but not yet exposed to the world enough to know how or why.
This is a feeling hard to imagine now that the internet is integrated into the real world in so many unprecedented ways. Being online is just as real as reality— in fact, it’s an integral part of it. But back in the day, the web felt like an entirely different realm, an escapist’s lost paradise.
I was actually only 11 years old in the infamous years of 2014 Tumblr, but the catch-all phrase embodies a feeling of the landscape online more than a strict time period. Most articles I’ve encountered in my research on the era rely on references to music and fashion, which is natural given their significance in the characterization of the prevalent aesthetics.
I don’t know how I would have spent my time during that era if I hadn't been listening to Nirvana, The 1975, Pierce the Veil, and My Chemical Romance on my iPod shuffle. And I couldn’t begin to illustrate the (literal) chokehold the tattoo choker had on my everyday outfits, wearing it with my soulless school uniform.
But what I’m more interested in is why I wake up some days and decide to choose my adolescent angst, again and again? Why I desired to do it back then, before I even possessed the self-awareness to know that those identity signifiers were a symbol of something deeper?
I know now that it’s not cool or edgy to admit you struggle with compassion. That you’re a sensitive, self-involved alien who blames the world, blames the schools, blames her friends, but never herself.
But at times, I get a taste in my mouth of a bittersweet nostalgia for a more immature mentality. Most mornings, I hesitate to swallow and indulge in the melodrama, although it feels just as intense and emotional as I always have.
But on some days, I do. I just can’t help it.
I suspect part of it has always been an attempt at a violence that I can live out in my mind, and in my clothes, and everywhere but in the real world—where I'm still just a vulnerable young girl.
When you’re expected to wear bows and frills, the contrarian expression is in wearing band tees and fishnets. It’s funny, I find that now, my personal style incorporates a little bit of both. It is something of a testament to the spectrum of my inner world, resonating with the age-old oxymoron ‘soft grunge.’
This duality is a part of my human condition now just as much as it was when I was younger, and I’m only getting better at expressing it. There will always be a rightful nostalgia to be felt and homage to be paid to the golden age of American Apparel and Lorde’s Pure Heroine, but I have a responsibility to respond to the intensity of my emotions in more constructive ways than I did in those days.
I have people to love, and responsibilities to honor. I have an awareness of my privilege, of gratitude. I have a stronger sense of myself, and have come to reckon with the conditions of my persistent sensitivity, its beauty and terror.
And perhaps, 10 years later, in 2024, I might make way for a new decade where I finally outgrow my adolescent angst and begin to embrace an adult one instead.
