*Updated with blog link
Someone recently pointed me towards the blog of her 8th grade daughter and I was instantly transported.
maybe it was the way it was written with all lowercase and no punctuation except in random places
Maybe it was something about the brooding expressions of faux pretension, the description of “unliveable” days and a week filled with “adventure and fabulous outfits.”
Maybe it was the combination of Disney jewelry and heavy black eyeliner on the authors, that decades-old symbol of the weighty straddle between childhood and womanhood.
In any case, I had hardly read three posts before I was hurled back in time a quarter century (eek) with Lysa and Rachel and Hally and Terri and other assorted adolescent misfit friends, memorizing the words to Rapture, trying to decide if we’d let boyfriends feel us up, and pretending to get high off the smoke wafting from incense sticks.
It seems so long ago. It seems like yesterday.
The days of circles over i’s. The days of sorting MnMs into piles before we ate them. The days of making out with short boys (hi Steve!) next to the bike racks behind school and hoping we wouldn’t get caught–but actually hoping we’d get caught. The days of Midsummer Night’s Dream rehearsals with the single greatest English teacher of all time ever (hi Dee O’Brien!). The days of testing limits and experimenting with identity, sexuality and blue eyeliner.
And of course, the single greatest joy any thirteen year-old girl could ever hope for: Being told you look 15.
“Ok, this is gonna sound very old of me,” Hally wrote me after I shared the blog with her, “but I can ‘t even fathom what we would have been like as 8th graders in this modern age.”
I imagine we would have been pretty much the same. Tortured and awkward and hormonal and creative, exploring our feelings through writing and art only with one major difference: We’d be putting it out there for anyone to read.
I imagine the exhibitionists in us would have liked it; even if our adult selves would have been mortified so many years later.
What are your strongest memories of thirteen? Do you think you’d have been blogging then?
