Twenty

Every year, I use my birthday as an opportunity for intensified reflection. Since starting my blog, I have made some of these musings public, and last year, I wrote about my perspective on leaving childhood behind, highlighting the lesson that growth and change will not rob me of my past or my memories. My experiences in the present and in childhood all run together into an unfolding story that I am glad to be living. As I turn twenty, I have been thinking about my teenage years, which I often split into two different sections in my mind: before my family left our old church, and after we joined our new one. The setting, characters, and plot of my life radically shifted through that change, so I tend to think of those times in my life as two different stories, but as I look back on my teenage years as a whole, I am struck by how much those two different chapters depend on one another, and how grateful I am for both of them.

Early adolescence is often rocky, and in my case, I had ever-worsening chronic health problems to add to the difficulty. I was lonely, agitated, and overwhelmed, and even though I did not recognize it until later, I struggled with depression. I dearly loved the church where I had spent my idyllic childhood, but in youth group, I felt weird and isolated. The leaders were great and the teaching was solid, but most of the teenagers were ill-behaved monkeys with minimal common sense and maximum hormones. The kids vied for attention, flirted their faces off, reveled in inappropriate conversations, and made rude remarks to one another. To be fair, I had many wonderful experiences in this youth group, but the overall environment was undesirable, and my selfish, prideful sense of superiority was also unpleasant. I felt guilty for my bad attitude, and despaired of ever having true friends.

I struggled tremendously with my health, dealt with various other trials and tribulations, and then faced the devastation of leaving that church. I had loved it with a passion for years, and the very idea of leaving this deeply familiar, precious place was enough to drive me to distraction. In one of many melodramatic journal entries, I wrote, "I might end up in an idyllic youth group situation where I make friends and feel like I belong. But that's kind of unlikely. God can do anything he likes, of course, but there is little likelihood of there being a kindred spirit for me at wherever we end up." On October 23rd, we left my church, and that night, I met that kindred spirit friend, although I had no idea at the time just what our friendship would become.

When my family joined our current church, I got an idyllic youth group situation when people actually liked me and valued my contributions, and where, despite my weirdness, I could truly belong. That was already more than I dreamed possible, but I also got my kindred spirit in Sophie, developing the kind of friendship I used to cry myself to sleep wanting. (As my dad put it, "Wow, just think of all the money we're saving on Kleenexes by going to a different church!") That same year, I made tremendous progress in my health, which greatly increased my quality of life, and the deeper sense of the gospel I encountered made it possible for me to stop being so condemning and bitter. This was a euphoric time, and I gushed with happiness, but I still resented the pain in my past. When interpersonal difficulties and other trials arose in my new life, I bolstered my sense of gratitude by remembering how bad things were before, and how wonderful it was to have friends to have conflict or challenges with. This was good, yet sometimes led to the twisted sense that I deserved these friends and good experiences as payment for what I once suffered through.

Those difficult years were not just wasted time before I could be happy. The important lessons I learned from them supported me in the future, and that future enabled me to see the value and meaning in what had once seemed like mindless misery. I have now rejected the societal lie that the teenage years are the best of one's life, and that everything else is downhill from there. In the past, I looked at my life in shambles and thought, "It's going to be even worse when I'm an adult, and since I'll be even unhappier then, I have to enjoy all of this and not take a single moment for granted." Then, when my circumstances changed, I felt like I was getting my last shot at youthful happiness before my opportunity was gone forever. I was happy then, but my perspective was still twisted. It turns out that the teenage years don't have to be the happiest of one's life, and that adults were wrong when they told my depressed, lonely, chronically ill self that I was experiencing the climax of my existence, and would later regret it if I didn't recognize this.

Because I believed that my teenage years were supposed to be extraordinary, I felt cheated when they weren't, and resented how hard they were. Then, when my circumstances improved, I felt like things were finally the way they ought to be. This skewed perspective demands gratification during a particular time of development and neglects to appreciate the goodness of a whole human life. The suffering I experienced in my earlier teen years grew my character and enabled me to enjoy future blessings even more deeply, because I knew what it was like to live without them. This is wonderful, and I have appreciated this for years, but I must remember that the significance of the difficult life chapter does not hinge on serving future satisfaction.

I do not want a perspective that only accepts suffering if it furthers my personal goals or maximizes my eventual happiness. The struggles I faced did serve me in that way and have blessed my life accordingly, but my personal satisfaction is not an adequate aim. My entire story, with both the moments of agony and the times of sheer joy, exists to point to something greater than myself, and ties into God's redemptive story, which is far more important than my individual life journey. My life experiences, both good and bad, are all part of His plan for my life, and even when they do not lead to satisfying narratives or a sense of closure, these events still matter. When I was depressed and felt like my life was worthless, I was wrong, but at least I was really feeling, not just using my memories as a way to reduce the past to a narrative that suits me. One thing I love about my journals is that reading them reminds me just how alive I was, and how nuanced and real my experiences were. In memory, I sometimes reduce them to narrative props and catalysts, but what I experienced in the past was no less real or less significant than what I am experiencing now.

I used to hate the idea of growing up, because I feared that I would forget my former life experiences or reduce and trivialize them to something insignificant. It seemed like a death to pass out of a life stage and then stop caring about it, and I hated knowing that the me who was so alive right then would someday be forgotten and disregarded, even by my own self. But my life does matter, and it serves a purpose. I am not a meaningless shout into a void or successful only so far as I achieve personal happiness. I exist because God made me, and my life is important regardless of what I do. I am not in a battle to demonstrate my potential or on trial to prove my worth. In all my memories, and in all my musings, I can rest in the knowledge that I was created by a God who knows and loves me, and am free to seek goodness and live for Him without having to prove myself or create and guard my own legacy.