If you are not a teenager or a parent of a teenager, this post may not be of any interest to you.
I had no reason to watch the television series ’13 Reasons why’ till I accidentally tripped on it on the Ellen show. I did not even know what the show was all about until then. I got to watch Clay and Hannah (I think the screen names are better to relate to for my blogging) being interviewed by Ellen. Frankly speaking, I am glad I got that opportunity even if it was by accident.
For a moment, I want to move away from the story about bullying, sexual assault and all other stuff that the show carries across with conviction to the viewing audience. All teenagers should make attempts to watch this show with their parents to understand what people who love them go through.
I do not like the presumptive notion that is usually made by many teenagers stepping into high school saying that sex and sexual experiences cannot be escaped. Instead of filling their minds with the things that should light up their minds as part of their higher learning, they fill their minds up, for all wrong reasons, with these presumptive and sometimes nervous and scary thoughts of what if they encounter it either by sheer physical attraction or by other disastrous means.
It must be admitted that teenage times are tough both from the perspectives of acceptance and of adjustments needed by them to transition into adulthood – mentally and physically. Sometimes, this is akin to caterpillars going through metamorphosis. While trying to deal with many conflicting needs on their own, they transition into adulthood from childhood and from dependence to independence. How they should be made aware of these transitions are immaterial for this blogpost. It is a material that psychiatrists should consider making it available to general public openly.
I accept that bullying does not stop at school like in the pre-social media days. It continues 24/7 because of the continuous online presence that these teenagers seek and want. Nothing wrong in being curious to know what others are saying about them or others – but it is a wrong type of curiousness that do not bode well to mature mentally or physically. The depiction of the character Clay is what everyone hopes for, but the character Bryce is the other extreme of this bullying situations gone wrong to result in sexual assault and rape.
On one of the shows in a TV series called ‘secrets of brain’, the brain is shown as a prisoner inside the skull living in dark. The world outside is not real as far as brain is concerned. It tries to make the best use of the senses to present an individual the world in color and sound and smell and beauty and all that glory that many take it for granted as the world that they see, live and die as humans, part of a larger animal kingdom we share the world with. If we are to completely trust what neuroscientists say about the brain seeing the world without using the senses as we see it, it will be unreal for us to believe that this world even exists.
Not being civilized as humans without any language or values or ethics or perspectives we could be as good as animals. Unfortunately, we are not animals – like it or not – our parents did equip us with such a notion of the world in our early childhood days to make us different within the animal kingdom. They used the power of language to describe what is good, what is not, what is right and what is not and how to express our emotions through words – which I think fail us terribly during the stages of metamorphosis into adulthood. We are known to regret many things that we did as teenagers when we get opportunities in our adulthood to view the world as a civilized human.
If for a moment, we disengage ourselves from all that and look at the TV show with all the depictions of bad happening to teenagers, it is us who are to be blamed for that. We as parents were there before. We think it is now our kids’ turn to do their learning bit of stepping into the adulthood. We think that we will not be heard and the painful memories our teenage times come back to haunt us, once again, but differently this time. We become aware that our love is often misunderstood by them and their troubled signals are often overlooked by us.
What if we look at the years in high school with a fresh perspective? I say, hit a reset button and think of polishing our aged thoughts and our missteps from their perspective to let them color their new thoughts and uncertain steps from our perspective.
What we endured and experienced in our days as teenagers need polishing to present the same to our kids to build new perspectives on how to endure the tough teenage times. What we understand as right and wrong then, need not be now. No topic of concern is a taboo to discuss and no topic of concern can be judged from our perspective. We have to invite their perspectives into our lives to say that our system is faulty to help them to process it and help them with what they are going through without relying on the system. We are here to understand their pains in any form whether you call it bullying or cyber bullying or sexual assault or rape.
Let us understand their emotional pains without branding it the way the system has branded it. The only thing that we all ought to be concerned is ‘are they hurt and if so how hurt are they’ and ‘how do we define that hurt’ without attaching it or binding them with any legal or moral or ethical obligations that are to be discharged. Extend the same leniency to a parent or to a counselor or to an expert functioning within a system that we thought would do the job for times to come. A common sense good objective should supersede all other nuances of the systems we have put in place to reassert that we live in a civilized world and that our kids do understand it and can live in it without any fear of retribution for their inadvertent deeds.
An adult would be able to deal with the world presented in any way – distorted, incoherent, chaotic – but our basic instincts as parents are to shield our kids from all that. We present them a world that we make them believe is full of laughter, joy and trust. When they come to grapple the world that they believed existed but no longer exists, they become vulnerable and at the same time are driven to conquer the world on their own and, in doing so fall many times over.
We as parents being sensible and sensitive about such falls, and, teenagers being open and trusting their closest ally, parents, will help to polish aged thoughts and shine light on new thoughts. It will pay dividends for the society and the system to change organically without taking away from an individual a notion of being civil to each other and be kind to each other. Please know that the world exists as we perceive it than as we see it.
Developing a perspective is an important childhood skill that must be learnt and taught to be able to deal with the transition and to be able to happily embrace the adulthood.