Maturity Knocks
I kind of fell off the antisnark wagon for a few minutes recently, and I'm not particularly proud of my fall from nicemodernism.
It was a combination of things. Recently, I've run into a whole metric pantload of media (and other) mentions of various alums of my high school - they're sending a cheery update to the alumni magazine (which I unwisely did not toss in the trash the second it arrived), writing in a faux-friendly tone to ask me for a donation they'll never get, working in other divisions of my company, showing up in model agency catalogs that cross my desk, appearing in various reality shows. Combine that with recently reading Prep, which was basically a nearly event-for-event account of my high school experience, and it's no wonder I suddenly found myself transported back to ten years, fifty pounds, two tattoos, and several therapists ago, when I was a nervous, self-loathing, universally gauche teenager who was in absolutely the wrongest possible school environment but wouldn't admit it to her parents or anybody, out of sheer unwillingness to admit she was wrong about something.
That inner sixteen-year-old is the part of me that wanted to RSVP to my five-year reunion with merely a photograph of myself flipping the bird. (Thankfully, my adult self talked me out of it.) That inner sixteen-year-old is the creature who keeps me from writing half the time, because she points out that everyone at St. Paul's told me I wasn't any good at it. It took me half of college to realize that I could, in fact, write after all, and the other half to decide I was going to try to do something with it. And it's the inner sixteen-year-old that's used her quick, nasty wit as a defense mechanism, from the second I was remotely confident enough to speak up to anybody. It's taken me the four years after college to realize that taking the low road of cutting people down in creative and funny ways to make me feel better about my own abilities isn't going to produce great writing any more than shutting up and taking the teenage cruelty to heart would.
It's why I see this whole nicemodernism thing as the ideal. I want to be comfortable enough with myself not to drag other people down, comfortable enough with myself to like the things and people I like without apology, and comfortable enough with myself to not have to go for the obvious joke.
Sometimes I succeed at that, sometimes I'm nowhere close. Hopefully the outer twenty-five-year-old will eventually take the helm on a permanent basis.
It was a combination of things. Recently, I've run into a whole metric pantload of media (and other) mentions of various alums of my high school - they're sending a cheery update to the alumni magazine (which I unwisely did not toss in the trash the second it arrived), writing in a faux-friendly tone to ask me for a donation they'll never get, working in other divisions of my company, showing up in model agency catalogs that cross my desk, appearing in various reality shows. Combine that with recently reading Prep, which was basically a nearly event-for-event account of my high school experience, and it's no wonder I suddenly found myself transported back to ten years, fifty pounds, two tattoos, and several therapists ago, when I was a nervous, self-loathing, universally gauche teenager who was in absolutely the wrongest possible school environment but wouldn't admit it to her parents or anybody, out of sheer unwillingness to admit she was wrong about something.
That inner sixteen-year-old is the part of me that wanted to RSVP to my five-year reunion with merely a photograph of myself flipping the bird. (Thankfully, my adult self talked me out of it.) That inner sixteen-year-old is the creature who keeps me from writing half the time, because she points out that everyone at St. Paul's told me I wasn't any good at it. It took me half of college to realize that I could, in fact, write after all, and the other half to decide I was going to try to do something with it. And it's the inner sixteen-year-old that's used her quick, nasty wit as a defense mechanism, from the second I was remotely confident enough to speak up to anybody. It's taken me the four years after college to realize that taking the low road of cutting people down in creative and funny ways to make me feel better about my own abilities isn't going to produce great writing any more than shutting up and taking the teenage cruelty to heart would.
It's why I see this whole nicemodernism thing as the ideal. I want to be comfortable enough with myself not to drag other people down, comfortable enough with myself to like the things and people I like without apology, and comfortable enough with myself to not have to go for the obvious joke.
Sometimes I succeed at that, sometimes I'm nowhere close. Hopefully the outer twenty-five-year-old will eventually take the helm on a permanent basis.
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