Why being a Teenager Sucks
You lose respect for your folks and you lose respect for yourself for believing them in the first place.
My mum likes to pull her lower eyelid when I do something she doesn’t approve of. It was a warning sign I always hated. One day, my high school friend said something inappropriate. My hand moved on its own, pulling my lower eyelid. It took me a second to realize what I was doing. I was shocked. To the very core of my being. What did I just do? And most importantly, why?!
Not to generalize, but this is something very common in teenage life.
You start noticing certain behaviors in your parents. Your dad rants about the power bill but forgets the TV on every night. Your mum complains about her colleagues at 7:30 pm, every dinner time.
It’s like a song on repeat.
And one day, the veil of crap lifts before your eyes. You start seeing your parents as who they are: Grown-up kids who complain better.
It happens to many teenagers, including myself.
I realized I’ve been idealizing a broken record.
My parents still struggled with the same financial problems and the same marriage issues. They were stuck and obviously too busy teaching me about their previous mistakes to focus on their own.
My humble conclusion at that time was: Being a teenager sucks. You lose respect for your folks and you lose respect for yourself for even believing them in the first place.
I forsake my parents as truth-tellers.
I knew by then that I was on a quest on my own.
Since I didn’t have any figure of authority to follow, I started experimenting.
I started questioning everything — habits, religion, manners — and coming up with my own answers.
It was confusing and exciting at the same time.
For some of you who lived through a similar experience, I see you.
Seriously, who likes to drown in a deep self crisis?
I sure did not like it one bit.
I loved waking up knowing exactly who I was and why I believed in what I believed.
That day, that confidence was taken from me.
Only doubts remained.
This inner crisis sent me on a perplex journey to understand how we think and how we behave.
I had two questions I wanted to be answered.
1 — Why do we become like our parents?
This led me to dive into cognitive behavior, the mother of all human behavior.
The answer is: you remember the first things you learn best.
Let’s say you are given a list of the 100 most popular baby names in the United Nations.
Your task is to remember in the same order as much as you can in one minute.
60 seconds tick, you start reciting.
Liam, Noah, James, William…Oops. What was the fifth name again?
This is known as the Primacy effect.
VeryWellMind explains it perfectly: It’s the habit to remember information presented at the start of a list better than information at the middle or end.
Your memory is wired to focus on the things you learn first. So you’re very likely to remember the 3 to 5 first names only. This is very true for first impressions too that people form about you. We all know how hard it is to change them.
The next stop on my journey was to find a solution.
This meant becoming aware of the source of every behavior and thought: The brain.
More specifically, the part we’re not necessarily conscious of which is the subconscious.
2 — How can we avoid it? (if we wish)
To stop reenacting our parent’s behavior, we have to become aware.
Your mind is a list. A long list of information your parents start teaching since you’re a baby.
The first things your memory starts recording — copies of their behavior, religion, beliefs — are trapped in your subconscious.
The part of the mind beyond your awareness of the moment. If the surface of an iceberg is your consciousness (thoughts), the hidden part is the biggest chunk that influences one’s actions and feelings (the subconscious ).
Now, imagine this part of your brain has been storing all of this data since your childhood.
Their folk’s behavior is etched in the very depth of the subconscious, unbeknownst to them.
This is why a lot of people start acting like their parents.
Your behavior is basically ruled by the very part of your brain which is unconscious.
Once you understand this concept, you can become more in control of your thought patterns. That’s when you can decide to act on them or not.
Meditation is one way to go deeper. This method worked amazingly for me as I was able to observe myself.
I became more in tune with the reaction chain of some thoughts on my behavior and my mental activity.
I became able to distinguish my own voice from all the other voices around me, including my parent’s teachings buried deep in my subconscious.
I became less influenceable and therefore started to change some outdated lines of thinking that influenced me as a child.
It’s not easy, but it’s a rewarding process. The inner crisis we experience as teenagers is a dissonance between who we think we are and who we really are on the inside.
The trick is to align both versions.
So, if you find yourself one day pulling your lower eyelid like myself or struggling with behaviors you borrowed from your parents, don’t worry.
There is a way out and you can start reclaiming who you want to be at any moment.
