Apparently, I have a lot of opinions today.
My coworker and I discuss a topic I have sooooo very many thoughts on: kids are people.
That seems like a no-brainer statement to me, but I know this doesn't ring true for a truly fascinating amount of people.
I don't understand people who forget what it's like to be a kid. I vowed as a teenager time and time again that I would never forget the way it felt to be treated as a kid, because I never wanted to be the adult that turned and perpetuated the cycle. I think little me would be happy to know that, for the most part, I kept those memories in tact. That said, I don't remember every little detail, and there was a time little me surprised adult me that I will never forget.
I have hundreds of notebooks of handwritten stories, journal entries, and poems from late elementary school past my high school years, all the way up to the point at which I got my first laptop. From time to time, I like to revisit these notebooks. Little me was incredibly creative, and I have multiple manuscripts under my belt inspired by something I wrote a long, long time ago.
During one such revisitation, I found a poem. The poem described adults offering a listening ear, only to tell teeangers that their problems were not real, that teenagers would have it so much harder after high school, and they didn't understand what actual problems felt like. In the same poem, I cited suicide statistics, comparing the lip service paid, the promises made and broken, and what happened to the kids who never found somebody who would listen.
I don't have the words to describe the dread I felt reading that poem, because all at once I remembered the younger version of me. I remembered being tired all the time. I remembered my parents not getting along but none of my siblings old enough to see it too. I remembered compulsively ripping out my eyebrows and eyelashes. I remembered faking physical illnesses to get out of school because the mental pain was not enough to matter. I remembered that no one believed me.
I think that I have my creativity and penchant for writing to thank for my life. Storytelling mattered so much that, while I wanted to die, I wanted to share stories more. Other kids don't necessarily have this kind of outlet. Other kids don't necessarily have something to hang on to.
Fast forward to my employment as a high school librarian --
"My teacher said everything will just keep getting harder."
"The counselor gave me essential oils and told me to go back to class."
"My dad says I don't understand what real problems are."
Over and over again, adults that these teenagers were supposed to trust were turned away. I cannot tell you how many times a student confided something heartbreaking to me, and how many times that day an adult told them that they didn't understand real life.
Teenagers experience just as broad a range of emotions as adults, if not more. Grief, heartbreaks, stress, neurodivergence -- you cannot tell what is going on just by looking at them, though I think perhaps some adults do believe they can. These kids, these young people, are experiencing obstacles just as hard, if not harder, than the obstacles presented in adulthood. I would often tell my students that I would never go back to high school, and I think that tells them how hard it is to be a kid. They would almost always reply that no one had ever said that to them before.
There are also problems that kids especially experience, experience far more than the average adult. I am speaking, in this case, of teenagers in America, so I think you understand where I am going with this thread.
American students live with the reality that one of their classmates may someday snap and bring a gun to school. Rather than do anything about this reality on a meaningful level, prevention is left to the schools themselves. In my case as the librarian, the adults employed at the school were required to install an app on their phone that would account for what students were in what room in case of an emergency. We had regular drills with this app, the entire school going dark and hiding to prepare for a predator that is damn near inevitable.
If you work at a school, you know that shootings are a common topic of conversation. I had many students ask what our plan would be if something like that happened, and I gave them both what the school asked us to do and what I was taught working with a library district whose active shooter training involved a police officer using a real gun, so we knew what noise to listen for.
I think a great deal about the time our school had an emergency (not shooting related) and I had to keep the students in the library locked down in the library. The students and I had The Conversation, and one of them said something that I will never, ever forget:
"It's okay. I can hold open the door."
A fifteen-year-old was reassuring me that, if and when an active shooter came to our school, he could hold the door open for everyone else. A fifteen-year-old already made that decision for himself, already visited the reality and decided who he would be in that situation.
So.
Yeah.
Kids have problems.
Kids are people.
And I write books that I hope make those people feel less alone.
Comments