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

[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