The last thing I ever wanted was to be boring.
I was reading a substack by my good friend Clare yesterday, who wrote about a very specific teenage transition, the one that goes from pleasing the teachers, being crowned as the good, perfect student, to wanting to please the other kids. Usually the cool ones.
There is a tension that evolves, because pleasing the cool kids, of course, involves simultaneously disappointing the teachers. Those are not her words, she said it a lot more poetically than me, but this is how I interpreted it, and it hit me pretty deep.
I had a similar experience, minus the slipknot t-shirt (though I LOVED that detail), but somehow (maybe because of that?) I managed to be rebellious enough to impress (some of) the cool kids, while reigning it in juuuuuuust enough to keep being a teachers pet. I felt very smug about this for many years until I realised it was simply frightening evidence of my long standing ability to please everyone except myself and lose all that was unique and actually special about me along the way.
In the pursuit of being anything but boring, I became the most boring version of myself.
In my early teenage years, before I was concerned with pleasing the cool kids, deeply satisfied with my role of being one of the ‘weird ones’ (at my school we were called the science quad kids, cause thats where our hangout was. Fair warning to anyone fantasising about bringing up kids in a small town, as incredible as it is, my school experience was way more Mean Girls than any of my Sydney friends, just fyi) Anyway, music was my LIFE. I’ve even written about it before. I bow down to my parents now, for all they did for me, but especially for driving me to concerts regularly between the of ages 15 - 17. I realise now how annoying that must have been, especially because my parents go to bed earlier than anyone I’ve ever known. It almost makes me emotional to have had my pure joy and obsession supported at, what I’m sure was, a difficult age, when it would have been easier to just say ummm, you’re 15? Fuck no.
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