What is something you wish you could tell your teenage self?

I think I have mentioned once or twice throughout this blog that I enjoy a good journal prompt now and again. More often than not, journal prompts look like questions, and they are designed to induce self-reflection which is then expressed in writing. Your response can be as long and detailed or as short and concise as you please, and you needn’t share what you have written with anyone if you don’t want. As I responded to a few prompts over the weekend, sourced from a website called Psych Central, I came across one which went like this: “If I could talk to my teenage self, the one thing I would say is…”, and the first thought that flowed out of my pen onto the page kind of took me by surprise, in a way, because it made me notice something about how I spent my teenage years. My response was this:


“I am the source of my own happiness”.


I couldn’t help feeling that this was quite a deep, profound thing to realise, almost 10 years on from adolescence. However, when I thought about it further, I came to appreciate that the cultivation of this life principle did not happen in a vacuum, nor was it in any way random - I have literature to thank (namely Women Don’t Owe You Pretty by Florence Given), and the acknowledgement that all the alone-time of the last 11 months has been some of my favourite time spent in my entire life thus far.


As I penned my free-flowing thoughts into my journal last Saturday, it made me think about why I settled on “I am the source of my own happiness” over anything and everything else I could’ve said instead. Was this the true constant, maybe? That I made other people responsible for my happiness when I was a teen, and that that was the root of all my problems?


As far as friend groups were concerned - YES. The majority of the so-called friendships I experienced in adolescence never lasted; they were fleeting - intense for short periods of time before eventually coming to an abrupt or drawn-out end. I know for a fact now, looking back, that my understanding of friendship as a 15-year-old was quite warped - it was all about conformity, about basing my own self-worth on how much I made others laugh, how much they disclosed to me, how ‘tight’ we appeared on social media… I cared little about what these people actually brought to my life or whether or not we had a true, meaningful friendship. Being ‘cool’ (whatever that means) or at least appearing like I was rolling with the ‘coolest’ people was a significant preoccupation for me as an adolescent, which meant I wasn’t very good at putting up boundaries for myself. I gave a pass to people I perceived as being higher up the social ladder to treat me whatever way they wanted, because the main thing was that they stayed in my life, on however flimsy a thread. I remember, thankfully, coming out the other side of a bad social experience in 5th year and realising just how important academic achievement was to me. For the next year, working hard at my studies and seeing As and Bs on my assignments gave me a huge amount of joy, which, while not an IDEAL source of happiness, was still connected to my efforts and my person, and not the approval of others.


And far as guys/crushes go - HELL YES. My god it actually pains me the amount of time I wasted as a teenager worrying about being good enough or looking pretty enough for boys that didn’t even deserve me. I couldn’t count now the amount of diary entries I logged as a teenager that described in nauseating detail every encounter I had with whoever was flavour of the month at the time (compared to now where the majority of my journal entries focus on my own emotions, my thoughts for the future, the way I relate to myself, etc.) My mood would fluctuate based on whether or not they made eye contact with me, how much they paid attention to me, or whether or not there were other girls around to distract them… *sigh* Don’t worry, I’m cringing for myself too.


The way I see it now, the most important relationship in my life is the one I have with myself, because as I saw with those flash-in-the-pan 'friendships' of yore, I'm always going to be there for me. And anyone lucky enough to be my crush or my friend would want to be bringing a HELLUVA LOT to the table before I go uprooting this amazing thing I have going with myself for them. Because as long as I am filling the void in my soul with other people (who could leave at any time) and hoping that these people will ‘fix’ me, I will never experience true joy.


Alas, as the saying goes: ‘hindsight is 20/20’. The reason I didn’t realise when I was a teen that the source of my happiness was myself was because I needed to go through years of character-building experiences in order to learn it instead, at the ripe old age of 26. That’s the catch, I guess. Life needs to be lived, blundered through, and reflected upon. It’s just like a video game: knowing all the hacks going in doesn't feel anywhere near as challenging, or, admittedly, as fun.

What would you say to your teenage self, if you could say one thing? Reflect on it this week and you may find you will learn something new about yourself.

See you next Tuesday.

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