personal

[nerdflighter]

Lately I have been thinking about how I live among and interact almost solely with people older than me by half a decade at least, all of them adults. I run my blog as though I am an adult, I write like one and talk like one (at least on the internet.) People have been telling me I'm grad student passing since I was 14. 
It should make me feel special. instead I just feel inadequate. I compare myself to the people around me and they're all older, they've lived longer, they have degrees. Why don't I have a degree? I ask myself, before I remember that I'm only 17.
So that sucks. 
But when I try to hang out with people my own age, I feel like a genius. I feel like a towering behemoth of maturity and intellect. It's not a good or comfortable feeling. It makes me dysphoric. It makes me feel isolated, because most people I know who are my age don't share my interests, so I end up being awkward and lonely. It sucks. 
So I guess I can either feel inadequate or isolated, and every time I'm given the choice I pick feeling inadequate. The inadequacy I can reason past and conquer. There is no cure for the isolation and loneliness.
But lately I've begun to wonder if I'm not hampering my own development. If I'm going to be a deeply screwed up adult (more than I was already going to be, that is) because I didn't hang out with enough teens. 
So that's another layer of bullshit I must now think past. Yay.

Comments

[gaytog]

I'm sorry; I wish you the best of luck in figuring this out. The boxes that people are supposed to exist within, just because of their age, are ridiculous.

[nerdflighter]

thank you <3

[sciatrix]

I'm ten years older than you, so take this with a grain of salt, but...

one thing I found at your age was that I had a lot more access to people of a variety of ages online and could self-select the ones I liked best than I did as a teenager. When I went to college, my available pool of people to interact with widened up, and it made it easier to find people I liked. (I isolated myself very deliberately for about three years, and I think I was also seventeen when I looked around and realized I was lonely.)

Find people you like. That's the long and the short of it. I have found, for me, that feeling inadequate never went away: the farther I progress, the higher I set my sights on the next target to feel inadequate about. It's got to be enough to be who you are right now.

I guess... my question is, why do you want to connect with fellow teenagers? If you're looking to connect with people from a similar life-stage to you--and I am not knocking that, it can be an important feeling--my advice would be to seek out other people your age who feel similarly. I hung out on WrongPlanet a lot; or there's teenagers in fandom too, or or or. If you're just feeling like your ability to social is broken or you're scared you'll never be able to social like an adult because you don't socialize well with teenagers.... eh. Focus on maintaining and developing the social relationships that make you feel good and happy. That's the thing that matters.

[nerdflighter]

it feels like...I keep holding out. I keep telling myself it will get better and I will be less lonely, but it hasn't happened yet and I don't know when it will, if ever, and it scares me.
I do connect with people my own age every once in a while, just not nearly as often as would be good for me.
the problem too often is that I can't find people like me even online, which makes me feel even worse about the kind of I am. like, how rare do you have to be before you can't even find people like you online?
so I take what I can get, mainly, and try not to think about this stuff for too long lest my brain break

[amberite]

This whole post is very relatable.

As someone who's been through the same thing, I'm not sure if I have a precise solution for it. I might be able to introduce you to some people who've been through it more recently than me. (I was going to say "people your own age going through this" then remembered that the people I was thinking of are college-age at this point - that's the thing about being a developmental outlier, there really aren't large numbers of us.) Going to community college and meeting the other teens there was helpful to me, although I didn't wind up extremely close to them in part because at the time I wanted to skip over the infantilization trauma rather than face it mutually with other people.

For what it's worth, I don't think hanging out with more teens would have screwed me up less, exactly - I did eventually (like around 18) meet social circles of people within a year or two of my age who had as much going on mentally as I did, and had found each other's company as adolescents, and my impression was that we all wound up semi-well-adjusted and took different types of damage in the process.

Speaking of age dysphoria, I have a post back in my old LJ somewhere about how the first time I went on T (for 6 months when I was 23) didn't lead to reliably passing as male but dropping my voice a little did wonders for my perceived age and that was a huge lifting of dysphoria. Remind me to dig through some of those old posts for you.

[nerdflighter]

that's one reason why I would really like to try T sometime in my life - I think my age would be a lot more ambiguous on T than not, which is what I'm looking for. ambiguity of age and gender and existence.
I think there's always going to be some damage, as a matter of course. I just don't know what kind yet, and I'm trying to be okay with that. mystery is the spice of life or whatever the hell that saying is.
so I guess I'll take hanging out with teens where I can get it and hanging out with adults where I can get it and try not to worry too much about getting fucked up in the process?
at some point though I'm going to have to deal with the consequences of these decisions and man I am not looking forward to that.