All About Adolescence
The death and resurrection of awe
The death of awe was a necessary loss, collateral damage in the quest for realism as a personal, internalized brand
When I found the clothing planted in the bottom drawer of my dorm room bureau, I knew instantly why it was there, who put it there, and what I needed to do. Scooping up the unfamiliar items, a purple Ralph Lauren button down lying on top, I made quick tracks for the laundry room and placed the clothes in one of the empty dryers. It was just another in a series of efforts to make me out to be the resident thief, ostensibly driven by my relative poverty and shitty wardrobe to steal the Polo-player embossed broadcloth shirts of my peers.
In my dorm room, I’d sought escape from this persistent bullying, a different flavor from the incessant physical threats of my previous school back home. There, the social machine churned out fist fights, sometimes announced during a free-for-all lunchtime as a much-anticipated after-school battle, other times portended for me in an ominous, anonymous phone call the night before. Every day, I’d arrived at school, ready for combat as an 11-year-old, then a 12-year-old, and then a 13-year-old.
The new school, full of wealthy boarding students living in surprisingly roach-infested spartan dorms, was to be the respite, the escape, a way out of the physically violent day-to-day of a public institution in a mid-sized Texas town. At that public school, from the first class day, girls arrived visibly pregnant and the principal had to make announcements throughout the first week that students were not to smoke in the hallways. It was a junior high.
For high school, things were to be different, there in the respite. But they weren’t. The gears of the social machine kept clicking along. In this case, my tormentors readily recognized that I, the scholarship student, did not have what they had — oil wealth, real estate wealth, political wealth, wealth wealth. The next step for those with a fine-tuned sense of another’s vulnerability and an off-key sense of kindness was this scheme: frame the Poor Girl as a thief. She must be so, as she is poor. I desperately wanted not to be “poor,” but stealing people’s broadcloth shirts certainly would not have been my solution to that problem.
At my junior high and well before that time, my escape, my respite from these endlessly turning circles of hell was folklore. Fairy tales, some people called them. Fantasy, if I turned yet again to the chronicles of Narnia or Tolkien. Whatever label others put on it, for me, it was a getaway. In these worlds, there were rules. The rules called for behaviors arcing toward purpose and a common good, and away from evil. In that escape world, if the human protagonist fucked something up, a mystical nonhuman — a humbly attired wizard, an oversized talking lion, a protective ancestral spirit — could materialize, speak cryptically or pointedly, and set the wayward human back on the right path or mete out appropriate punishment.
It was nothing like the real world, where people seemed to do whatever the fuck they wanted without much consequence. Yet I would spend my time, even in reality, feeling and sensing guiding spirits around me, expecting them unseen or not, to set things aright, to set the straight path aglow and lead me out of this misery.
For my dorm room, I bought two huge posters, fantastical depictions of unicorns, lions, and fairies, in hindsight embarrassingly overwrought and glowing with lavender and gold. They drew me in and away from the adult-free 24-hour grind of juvenile cruelty where I had to learn to fight a new kind of battle, unannounced and interminable. I could lie there in the glow of those tacky posters and wish myself away. I could escape with a sense of awe, a belief that these magical beings were real, cloaking me and protecting me and someday definitely going to reveal themselves and fix all of this.
I felt their presence most when I was outside, away from the social machine. The school was nestled in green hills broken by valleys full of boulders that tumbled in floods, coming to rest under trees sheltering dark spaces and creating shadows. We weren’t supposed to go into these valleys, but like all good protagonists, I saw this rule as one made to be broken, a special case for something so precious. As often as I could, I wandered down to the school’s sports fields and edged over toward the trees, on the lookout for faculty or students who would bust the Poor Girl. And then, I’d disappear, vanish out of space and time, into the woods. Quite deliberately.
Clambering over boulders as big as my room, looking for tadpoles in the water pooled transiently under overhanging limestone, climbing knobby trees, peeking underneath drab fungi, and seeking out four-leaf clovers, I felt the presence of that magic world as part of this quiet, lonely nature all around me. It gave the insensate some sense and made friends for me of ferns, fungi, and frogs, and I gloried in the feeling of life sympathizing with life. I felt awed to be a part of it, like a semi-magical creature myself who could feel and understand a spirit that others could not. It was my true respite and my happiest place.
And then, one day, just like that, as quick as the snap of fingers, it was gone.
The death
I remember clearly where I was and how it felt. I was at the edge of the sports fields, again, looking around cautiously before vanishing into the trees. I can’t explain how or why it happened at that time, in that place. But as I was watching out for potential snitches, I looked around me, at the clovers, the mushrooms, the clustering live oaks, and the path leading away from that awful reality, and I realized with an almost audible click in my mind that there was no magic here.
There was not an invisible world of beings that could caretake for me, guide me, or set alight a path to freedom. They weren’t there under the leaves or lurking in the gullies. These were just plants, fungi, dirt, rocks, and water, just as real and unmagical as the school and its grinding social machine looming behind me. Just more parts of this strangely unprofitable existence, with no more interest in my well-being than dorm peers who wanted everyone to think I was a thief, who mocked my clothes, defaced my things, and wrote, “I want to suck Ed’s dick” on my religious studies bible.
I took down those posters in my room and replaced them with nothing. Something grew around me, a shell made of irritants, manufactured from raw goods. It left me tough, armored, and tightly closed. From the inside, not driven by magic but by a sudden practical acceptance of this shitty reality around me, I transformed from a hopeful but beleaguered preteen who felt magic everywhere into an analytical adolescent pragmatist who above all sought to see the world as it is, no frills. This newly wrought non-child version of myself was fired in an instant of scorching epiphany and cooled to a nail-hard toughness.
On the journey that followed, I found science. I found a practical, repeatable framework for evaluating the world around me: observe, question, test, assess, conclude, recalibrate, repeat. I applied an ever-sharpening analytical skill, a mind fine-tuned to hard truths, equipped to peel and scrape away layers of irrelevance and get to the pithy meaning at the core. But the framework also was a cage.
Show me a vista of snow-capped mountains, and my gears spin away, tooth in notch, clicking out caveats about climate change, fires, bark beetles, and floods. Speak to me of lovely getaways with friends, and I’ll sensibly remind myself of the imperfections in the social machine, little tiffs and dustups that make “lovely” an elusive dream. Total delight does not exist in the real world. Observe, question, test, assess, conclude, recalibrate, repeat.
I didn’t forget the nonexistent fairies, the ancestors cupping safe hands around me, the unreal world of truth and righteousness. They’d linger at the back my mind, leaving me longing for that feeling again, to use it as a balm against the constant bite of those gears. Yet as much as I yearned for the magic of feeling unalloyed awe about something, anything, I resolutely refused to allow it in, fully prepared to sacrifice the imaginary to preserve the pragmatician.
Imagine I’m me
In a scene from Mike Nichols’ movie interpretation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Army captain John Yossarian is in an army base infirmary, having endured and witnessed unspeakable loss and danger. In conversation with two other characters, one an Army chaplain and the other an operations officer, he invites the chaplain to do some perspective-taking. The chaplain responds that he has difficulty even getting his own perspective.
Yossarian: Imagine that you are me.
Chaplain: That’s hard. Sometimes I even have trouble imagining that I’m me, if you know what I mean.
Heller was writing about the chaplain being caught in the loop of Catch-22, which has dehumanized and objectified him and everyone else on the base as a cog in a capitalist machine in which individuals are irrelevant. This trouble “imagining that I’m me” follows on ongoing trauma-generated anxiety about what “me” is and means and should be and whether it even matters. Imagining someone else, much less empathically, means first locating one’s own boundaries. In doing so, we must label these limits as Me, as matter, as a me that matters. A huge risk in a world that grinds dreamers to dust under reality’s wheels.
At the end of that scene, Yossarian realizes after the chaplain’s remark that he must save his individual self or there will be no survivors. As he makes a break for it out of the infirmary window, the operations officer yells after him, “You’ll be on the run with no friends! You’ll live in constant danger of betrayal!” Yossarian’s response: “I live that way now!”
Trauma has a way of removing the security of agency, the sense of a self that tells us who we are and why we are. I thought as a child that I sensed an unseen world around me, as real to me as the food I ate or the books I incrementally read to rags, and it gave me hope and made me feel I mattered. But it didn’t save me, or at least it didn’t seem like it could.
So I geared up instead with the most confining emotional chainmail humans can devise, deliberately self-bedecked as a realist, a pragmatist. I acquired this armor by slaying belief, awe, and hope. Although I bore heavily the weight of my defenses, constantly on guard, still no one would ever get the jump on me, surprise me, or make me a dupe. The catch, the flaw for me, protagonist, was that I also could not be awed.
Yossarian’s escape is his attempt to regain his sense of self, to release himself as a cog and dissociate from the machinery. My own Catch-22, I came to realize, was that I’d murdered magic one day, or at least let it die, and in the process tried to stifle the vulnerability needed to experience true awe. The death of awe was a necessary loss, collateral damage in the quest for realism as a personal, internalized brand. I’d trapped myself, sensitive, creative, and imaginative, as a spinning cog in my own machine, operating only against a constant danger of betrayal that would expose the tender, vulnerable center.
The resurrection
I didn’t plan the loss of my personal and precious unseen world. The realization that it simply didn’t exist burst within me like a balloon, there one second, fragile yet as palpable as could be, and gone the next with a pop. I simply accepted it and knew the reality was unarguable. But once I realized how much I had locked out by locking myself in, finding my way back to awe was not a matter of simply re-inflating the balloon. Like all efforts to undo a death, it would take work and it could fail. After all, where could I turn to restore an authentic sense of an unseen world, to capture that spirit of awe, to create spaces in that armor to let some hope slip in — without the impossible risk of being gulled into belief all over again?
I knew I couldn’t do it. The solution had to be a material one, an authentically real world full of surprises and wonder, of truths that stretched my imagination. To see what cannot be seen, I had to look up. And I had to look within. And I had to do some work and let go.
I taught myself, or relearned, that in beholding the expanse of the night sky without leaning on a framework — no test, assess, conclude, recalibrate, repeat — I can loosen my confining armor and think about impossible distances, infinities, and unknowns without seeking to explain them. I try to forget time and place, just as I used to lose the sense of both while wandering in the woods, peering under fern fronds.
Thanks to curved lenses and electron guns and gold particles smattered about like so much fairy dust, I can take in the tiny watchworks of the microbial sphere. In this infinitesimal world, the denizens operate in time and space on unfamiliar scales. Fantastical shapes, wars and rivalries, invasions and escapes and other unimagined activities all become real, tangible, and true. It is flabbergastingly, mindbogglingly awesome, on its own, without reasons why.
And I can engage in this practice fearlessly. Expanses of the cosmos and the invisible world closer to home aren’t going to wash away in a sudden incursion of reality. Awe at their very presence cannot be doused so easily. The rules in fairy tales and fantasy worlds are often good ones, but the tidy endings, with duly disposed consequences and rewards, are fantastical. Not so with the infinite and infinitesimal in nature. These systems operate on nature’s rules, laws that apply in perpetuity throughout the universe, no loopholes. And that’s no fantasy.
But the reality is, I’ve got work to do. I have to resist the fear of the social machine, of being the poorest cog, the most vulnerable, the easiest to injure. I have to work on letting go, imagining me, unarmored and open, escaping the way I live now and allowing that glorious feeling of mattering again.
The life
Most nights, I go outside alone and look at the sky. I try to go at the same moment of twilight, and because I am neither an astronomer nor a philosopher, my ritual is quite basic: to find the Big Dipper and from there, the Pole Star. If it’s an especially clear night, I put my head back as far as the bone spurs in my neck allow and stare at the starlight sparkling through the crystalline air. If I capture a “shooting star” streaking across the darkness, I feel humbled and awed that little me, standing alone in that quiet moment in time and space, saw that bit of burning rock flame out its existence, sudden as a blink. On the evenings I make it out there, I experience an increscent resurrection of a long-dead feeling of magic, metaphorically perceived, yet oh so real. Which is to say, I’m working on it, working on letting go and being alive again, in a different kind of way now.
