THE CICAK.com

A teenage lament

By QU HSUEH MING

We teenagers are peculiar. Neither children nor adults, we are in a transitional period - one that lasts eight years, and in some cases, more. And it is because of this that we are sometimes treated as pariahs by society as a whole. Think about it. Adults treat us like children (and therefore beneath them) and children treat us like adults (and therefore not worth their time). In fact, the only group that seems to understand us is the teenage clique.

Grown-ups in particular just don’t seem to know how to treat us. Some round us up and assume we are adults, and some round us down and treat us like children. They just can’t seem to except very well to a combination of both. We resent it when they coddle us, yet we feel strangely cheated when they assume we are old enough to take care of everything. We despise the condescending way they treat us, yet we are extremely dissatisfied when they don’t give us the attention we demand.

Perhaps it is because we teenagers feel so suffocated, for those of us whose parents have propensities to round us down, that we must resort to certain methods to circumvent watchful eyes. Byzantine arrangements are part and parcel of every teenager’s life. Most, if not all of us, can shamefully admit to sneaking out or lying about our location at least once. Deceit and intrigue are considered common practise. Good training for adulthood.

For those of us whose parents have the inclination to round us up, you would expect us to relish our uninhibited freedom. Yet we feel something missing. We try to find substitutes, to no avail. To the casual observer, it may even seem as though we are trying our best to perhaps gain some attention, but this is clearly false.

And so we choose to hang around our peers as they are the only ones who understand what we are going through. Because we can relate, we empathise with each other.

Parents then tell us, “You hardly talk to us,” or “I think you are spending too much time with that Max boy.”

It’s a periodic war. Everything becomes an argument, be it our clothes, the music we listen to, our choice of friends, the amount of time we put into our studies and even the food we eat. We bicker over everything. How many teenagers can confess to never having fought with their parents?

Perhaps it boils down to one problem.

They just don’t understand us.

Of course, they deny this. If this secret got out, their authority would be undermined. They seem to make sense, pointing out that they have gone through their teenage years, whereas we have yet to experience adulthood. But based on their line of thought, we would be able to understand toddlers - why they burp, why they seems to find hitting others with Lego blocks amusing, and so forth. But do we really understand infants? Of course not.

The same goes for our parents. Can they honestly remember what it was like at age 20, 25 or 30?

Teenage years are undoubtedly our most painful ones. Fraught with insecurity, loneliness, self-actualisation and disappointment, these are hard years for everyone. But it is also the most important period of our lives.

It is during this crucial period that we set in motion the thoughts and actions that determine who we will be. It is now that our malleable personalities take shape. It is now that we really discover who we are. And through this difficult time, we would certainly appreciate support from those who brought us into this world.

Perhaps I shouldn’t gripe so much. Maybe in 20 years, I will be telling my sloppy teenage son, “Tuck in your shirt, wash that awful gel out of your hair, and if you want an earring that badly, I’ll pierce it for you myself!”

I will probably say this, “In my days, I always listened to everything my dad said, I’d get a good walloping had I acted the way you did, I had to walk twenty miles to school each day, and I always did my homework.”

Perhaps.

But it doesn’t stop me from whining about it.

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QU HSUEH MING is a contributing writer for theCICAK.

He thinks writing in the third person is pretentious, but does it anyway because “all the cool people do it.” An A-Levels student at Sunway College, his teenage status is coming to an end.