TMI: adolescence

Adolescence
There is nothing wrong with today's teenager that twenty years won't cure.
-Author Unknown


Preadolescence and Early Adolescence
My voice had deepened early, but my height and weight of the 6th – 8th grades led me to have a small guy’s aggressive mentality. I entered Jr. High School as a strapping 5-foot 1-inch, 100-pound display of adolescent manhood. I felt as though I always needed to prove myself, and to show off any skill that I could muster to compensate for my lack of size. I became aggressive and defensive in sports and in friendships. Sometime during 6th grade, I had become very social; I was “a social butterfly” as my mom liked to call it. And within my social circles, I always wanted to be the leader, and I led by my inflated ego. My parents like to call 7th grade “the rebellious year”. During this time, my dad’s job was requiring him to travel some, and my mom “just didn’t understand” what it was like to be a 12-year-old boy. I desperately needed to discover who I was, but I was trying hard to create my image to be someone I wasn’t. Fortunately, I saw fit to seek the counsel of “older, wiser” guys who might help me. Unfortunately, these “older, wiser” guys were actually just 8th graders who were going through their own rebellions. We experimented at pushing the limits on what we could get away with, and we partied and behaved as though we were much older than we were. By these risk-taking behaviors, we were seeking experiences that would create high intensity feelings. Adolescents like intensity, excitement, and arousal. As most young teenage boys, we were driven by our hormones; and with that combined with my inherent need to prove myself, I became very chauvinistic with the girls in my social circle. In all our efforts we had a strong appetite for novelty and thrills.

I needed to improve my decision making, and I needed to develop an accurate self-understanding. During the summer after my 7th grade year, by my parent’s insistence, I spent a lot of time with the youth group from my church. The openness and genuine care that they expressed was in stark contrast to the highly competitive, highly judgmental group that I ran around with at school. I experienced a major defining moment that June during a summer church camp held at Howard Payne University. It was an accumulation of events and the environment that God used to gain my attention; but specifically I remember a conversation I had with my youth minister, Dennis Perry, and his friend, Chris Rice that helped me reach a point of turning towards Christ’s ways. Essentially they challenged me in a way that I needed to be challenged. They cast a vision for me to learn to lead others by Christian submission. This made sense to me as it incorporated who I was with the community I was learning to love.

When I returned to school for my 8th grade year, I brought with me a new direction and new sense of who I was. Of course, I had not anticipated the awkwardness of the transition I had yet to experience. While I had traveled a distance spiritually, the social group I rejoined had not shared in my journey. My relationships with school-friends suffered, and I did not feel that I had a best-friend or confidant. Throughout the year I rediscovered both a sense of independence from my school-friends and a sense of isolation and loneliness. During this separation from my “rebellious year” I began to spend more time with God, learning to know Him and trust His direction. In this way, for the first time, I began to truly discover who I was, and where I was going. These changes in my attitude and way-of-thought, along with several physical changes (finally starting to catch up in-way of height and weight), began to build in me a healthier self-concept.

Socioemotional Development of Teenage Years
In High School, I skipped the top-dog phenomenon all-together. I was comfortable in who I was trying to be, and was building healthy friendships with freshmen through seniors. For me, reaching High School was like reaching the summit of a large mountain that I had been climbing towards adulthood. I was still in many ways a child, but I was finally earning freedoms and trust that allowed me to “stretch my wings” and mature. Of course at the time, I was still yearning to reach ahead into the next stages of maturity. As much as I loved reaching high school, at times, I considered it a necessary evil that had to be finished so that I could be in college. (Of course later, I thought college was only a necessary evil so that I could be free from restrictions and everyone else’s expectations.)

As a teen, I believed I was invincible. According to David Elkind’s work, I was simply reaching a very normal stage of adolescent egocentrism, called personal fable, in which a teenager has a strong illogical sense of personal uniqueness. I felt that almost no one could really understand how felt or how I thought. I considered myself a deep and mature thinker, and an athletic Olympian; and I believed that nothing could stop me. My best friend in High School, Steele (who was a year older than me), fueled that fire with his similar approach to life. Together we could accomplish more significant works (and more silly mischief) than either of us could on our own, and so we joined forces in all of our activities.

DeSoto High School held much diversity within its student body. Ethnically, the school was built with approximately 30% Caucasian students, 60% African-American students, and 10% Latino and Asian students. Very poor families and very rich families were represented, and the school offered a wide variety of curricular and extra-curricular activities for students to participate in. With our combined efforts, Steele and I brought about victory and caused disaster in school sports, in theatre, in the cafeteria, as library aids, in the halls, and in any course that we could manage to take together. We tended to buck authority when we could get away with it, and each of us was determined to do things our way and be successful. For me, I suppose that this was an extension of my early longing to be The Natural. We considered ourselves a dynamic duo socially, and creatively; and spiritually, we made every effort to hold each other accountable to our Christian values and we attempted (often with failure) to humble each other.

Through the relationships I experienced within my family and with my church family, and through the activities that inspired my self-concept, God gained control of my heart, and he turned my motivations towards Him. I wanted to please Him and to serve with all of my strength. At the age of 16, I felt a sure and strong calling to ministry. I instantly determined to try to be a peace bringer where there was no peace, leader where people needed leading, and a servant to others for God. I aggressively began chasing this life-direction in every way I could. I took a job as a janitor for my local church, I played guitar on the youth praise team, played bass for a college worship band that led in area youth retreats, created videos for my youth minister to use in worship services, and participated in community evangelism efforts. I was eager to learn by serving and experiencing ministry. I think in many ways, this centered me, as it gave me grounding and intent.

Dating scripts are the cognitive models that guide individual’s dating interactions. My early theories of dating were developed based on my favorite show of my adolescence, Saved by the Bell. On the show, each teenager had their mate: Zack had Kelly, Slater had Jessie, and Screech always wanted Lisa. My early dating practices were to find a steady, and become the “it couple”. I would find interest in a girl, flirt with her until she reacted with interest, and then court her. Though I only dated a handful of girls over my first three-years of high school, I was seldom without a girlfriend, as each relationship lasted between six-months and a year. It is interesting to me that I would even use the term “dating” to describe this era of my adolescence, since we really did not go on many dates, but rather, we would just hang-out with each other, or with our youth group.

As my senior year of high school neared, I knew many changes were ahead. My best friend would be going off to college (which meant that I would have to learn to cause mischief on my own!). While this at first seemed like a sad adjustment for me, I think that it was a very healthy and freeing change. Steele and I had learned to depend on each other for fun, for learning, and even for our identity. I was now focused on finding my own self-portrait, and I approached this adventure with excitement and interest. I involved myself in self-expression in art, music, leadership, friendship, conversation, reading, and in planning my future. I focused on dating many girls, rather than having a girlfriend. I wanted to challenge my passions and my priorities. Though I did have a circle of very close friends, my myriad of activities allowed me to interact in all of the cliques and crowds. I do not mean to infer that I would attempt to blend-in to each group, but rather, I did not label myself as belonging to any group. I just wanted to be me and be friends with anyone with whom I shared common interest. Being a bridge-builder became very important to me, and it is a large part of who I am today.