what shit you struggled with in you teenage days?

[Max8]

so what shit you struggled with during puberty ?

[Roy]

I acted out because I subconsciously felt like I was being judged as something being wrong with me for being too quiet and not doing the other things that "normal" kids do. This made me really resentful of my social environment at that age (which still lingers to this day in subtle ways). However I didn't know how to get attention in healthy ways back then.

This led me to doing stupid shit, like getting arrested for vandalism and shoplifting at a Wal-Mart with some of my friends, I was the main instigator leading the whole thing. No charges were pressed and I didn't get a criminal record. It was just a one off thing, as far as they knew so it was only a slap on the wrist. I got very very lucky.

My behavior was an unusual reaction and quite out of character for a kid at 14. It's not like I was living in poverty, or known as the rough/bad kid. I had enough money to buy things, I did better than most academically, I played sports, I had a solid friend group.

I just didn't understand how to react to the feelings that were inside me.

That Stage Red impulsiveness, resentment, and childishness still is with me in tiny ways to this day. Even after getting into adulthood and doing years of different kinds of personal development. Your past makes up a lot of who you are. It's incredibly difficult to change that and wipe it out completely. Unless you have some sort of psychopathic superpower, or so  extremely left brained (near autistic) that you can partition/delete those aspects of yourself.

Being aware of those kinds of things in yourself is a good step however.

[soos_mite_ah]

I was over all a good kid. Stayed out of trouble for the most part, got decent grades, minded my own business. That said, even though I was a "good kid" I was still really troubled. And most of the time the adults didn't notice because I wasn't overtly acting out. But looking back, I stg like 90% of my personality was rooted in dysfunction. 

Here are some of the things I dealt with from age 13-19 off the top of my head. The bolded items are things that I'm still deal with. 

emotionally abusive family (which was also physical when i was younger than 13) and a lack of decent guidance which led to the following:

• eating disorder and body image issues (was on a whole nother level of bad back then)
• dysfunctional relationship with food 
• issues with trusting people platonically and romantically
• attachment issues in general
• issues with emotional vulnerability/ hyper rationality which translated into me being emotionally closed off
• anger issues (both in terms of bottling things up and being annoyed all the time) 
• depression
• anxiety 
• suicidal thoughts
• being angsty all the fucking time (this an the anger issues led to a cringy, chaos centric sense of humor)
• trouble focusing in school 
• not knowing what healthy relationships looked like and therefore almost getting into toxic dynamics
• just plain insecurity around making friends and shyness (there was a period of time where I barely talked)
• being known as "the therapist friend" and attracting people who would trauma dump on me
• isolation from others 
• feeling like I didn't have any decent role models (and as a result, mourning the relationship I'll never have with my parents) 
• pressure to figure your entire life out 
• lack of discipline 
• lack of personal independence which made me kind of stunted at times
• procrastination (also related to anxiety) 
• issues with setting boundaries and confronting people
• the pressure to mature faster than your peers and feeling disconnected to them when you can't relate to them 
• assuming that everyone hates me 
• academic pressures and trying to figure out my own path when the adults around me were pushing me in a certain direction
• being emotionally burnt out from everything above

issues with being an asexual South Asian woman in Texas (i identified as asexual through my teen years)

• internalized misogyny 
• acephobia 
• homophobia (there were a bunch of people who thought I was gay and would talk shit about me behind my back) 
• dealing with systemic inequality with the education system when I was trying to get into college and while I was in college 
• internalized racism (didn't have much of it but it was still a thing) 
• the existential crisis that came with the Trump presidency and dealing with the repercussions of that 
• the whole model minority thing where I felt like I couldn't make mistake in figuring out my life
• figuring out my religious and spiritual beliefs
• dealing with creepy men in general 

Other: 

• figuring out how dating and relationships worked (still figuring out more layers to that and I think I always will but back then I was on a whole nother level of cluelessness)
• issues with grief (lost a lot of family members during that time and didn't have any parental guidance on how to deal with those emotions
• the existential crisis that I got from grief and loss
• losing friends and then not having many/ not having much of a social life after moving into a different phase in my life
• loneliness in general
• stress from school work and college applications (which ultimately didn't go my way AT ALL therefore leading to anxiety about the future)
• constantly sleep deprived 
• physical health issues (went undiagnosed until I was 21but symptoms started showing up when I was 17 or so but I didn't think much of it so I didn't get it checked) 
• dealing with ADHD (I still have it but I'm better at managing it)
• planning out my adult life under late stage capitalism 

Edited October 25, 2021 by soos_mite_ah

[something_else]

I'm basically only just out of my teenage days and still dealing with the struggles from those days, but I'm now in a place where I can start to unwire some of that shit

I was bullied badly from like age 7 - 14. I had very loving parents which I'm extremely thankful for, but they were loving to the point where I was definitely coddled and that made me quite sensitive. I was also an only child so I was a bit undersocialised with people my own age. The result of that is me being a go
od target for bullies in that I would usually react really intensely e.g. crying, shouting and so on which is what they get off on

That's caused me to have intense social anxiety and I often feel quite uncomfortable expressing myself authentically, many many layers of filters with people I don't already feel comfortable around

Other than this, I feel extremely grateful for the environment I grew up in. I feel like I've got a very mentally stable and grounded baseline and I've rarely struggled with things like depression or general anxiety that I've see many of my peers seriously struggle with. It's just socially that I'm totally fucked 

[diamondpenguin]

Homophobia and crippling anxiety really fucked up my teenage years. 

[sara373]

On 10/24/2021 at 10:42 PM, Max8 said:

so what shit you struggled with during puberty ?

isolation. And my friendships but they married and moved on or i went to another school.  I had trust issues. I had Mild acne and zero support to make things easier. I was prone to coping mechanism, which I got free from except 1. I was critical for not self-improving  and little self-thanks for improving.

I was overly conscious as a teenager of what others think, but I learned this yr that people will think what they want, I can't control that, only my reaction. I have always been quite accurately conscious of what others can see of me incorrectly, and I try to explain myself (makes it 5x harder).

I have felt easily misunderstood during my teen yrs. This has changed over the years and I have learned to know when to speak and to whom. I had the emotions such as fear of sin and the consequence so I never felt like a good servant of God, though one can hope, but always hope and then despair. It made it hard for me the most when family would speak on God's behalf such as his anger on me etc. If I knew this word before, things would have made sense but I didn't know to realize they were speaking on 'God's behalf' as I finally called it. 

When I was 10 yrs old my teacher bullied me but I did not realize at the time the signs. I was aware I'm not a bad person so I had a clear conscience, except her reactions affected my self-esteem in my teen yrs.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 27, 2021 by sara373

[Random witch]

I felt weird,

I felt like I have no place anywhere,

I felt like something between man and woman,

like a weird creature that you can't categorize and I hated this feeling.

I had a lot of rage inside me, I wanted to destroy anything. I was a bag of intense emotions. 

How about you?

 

 

 

 

[PurpleTree]

it was a mess imo

a lot of anger and i didn't know where to put it, a lot of it i suppressed or directed towards myself

then i started to (self) medicate

 

i'm still recovering from that time and i'm well into my 30s