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

[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.