What my teenage poetry taught me about being a modern-day man
A nostalgic journey through embarrassing teenage writing resurfaces lessons and unexpected connections.
Sometimes I find myself digging through my past to figure out who I am in the present. It feels faintly pointless: what can the 37-year-old me learn from my teenage past? I'm a father to two children, with a job, mortgage and partner. My concerns as a 17-year-old were mainly centered around where I could buy cheap guitar strings, and whether I'd ever pluck up the courage to speak to the girl I fancied in my History class (spoiler: I didn't).
I kept a Livejournal for my teenage years and beyond: for those not of the millennial persuasion, this was an early social network centered around personal blogging. I deleted it a decade ago, of course, but kept a backup and recently resurrected it for old times' sake.
It made for embarrassing reading: I had some pretty ill-informed opinions on things like feminism and gender, and despite thinking I was very self-aware and intellectual at the time, I clearly had little interest in or exposure to anything besides myself. I'll forgive teenagers most of these things, but it was still a sobering read.
Portrait of the artist as a young idiot
I also recently dug out old poems and prose I wrote towards the end of my teens and early twenties. This was equally embarrassing and felt like an archaeologist digging through layers of rock: ah, here's the period where I read Catcher in the Rye and tried to write like Salinger. This layer must be the point where I started listening to Bright Eyes. This stratum is where my parents split up.
One piece stood out because I still remember writing it: it's 2005 and I'm 19 years old. I wrote a short piece that was supposed to be a letter from older me writing to my then-teenage self:
"How I came to be sitting in my old bedroom alongside the sleeping teenage me that I still envy, I cannot explain. And as to why I am here, the only possible explanation is a sense that, as much as you may scoff to hear it, this time in your life will be amongst the greatest."
The piece continued in this vein — I think the idea was to try to boost myself, reassure my frustrated end-of-teens self that interesting, better things were on the horizon.
Story within a story
The coda to this tale, though, was the real-life crossover: I left the paper on my bedroom desk and came back from school to find my mum had discovered it, and written her own note on the back which was in response to mine (and, I think, also written in the form of a "letter from the future"). At the time, my parents were in the process of separating, and I had no time for either of them and just wanted to be away from it all.
I ended the piece with this:
"Before rising from your desk, I add a line to my brief note. In the morning you will wake up angry, and ignore my message, as I did twenty years previously."
Despite writing this in 2005, I was unable to be objective enough to take my own advice. I was angry that my mum had read it (let alone wrote back) and threw it away, unable to spot the irony.
Reading it again now almost 20 years later—as teenage me alluded to—I wonder about whether those days really were "amongst the greatest" in my life. I remember feeling low, alone and unhappy at many points back then. But I also know this doesn't tell the whole story. Reading another old prose piece from 2005 which ended—cheerfully—with "you will be denied your dream and your life will never be what you imagined", I scrolled down and spotted a comment, left by a new school friend I'd recently made which is still online now. His comment read:
"what you sayin matt in the hatt. nice piece of ranting there. this is what you get up in your own time then eh? good writing but you know i love your style. bit morbid / negative. theres always hope somewhere man. keep it up you morbid claxon. xxx"
I haven't spoken to John, author of the above comment, in over a decade. But connected through embarrassing teenage juvenalia and the permanence of the internet (or perhaps just the shared experience of being teenagers in the early 2000s), I felt hope and love once more for those times and what they meant. For all my "man feelings" back then, here was another guy boosting me up, sending me support and love, and managing to compliment my shoddy work – all at the same time.
Maybe there's something to be learned after all from wallowing in ancient history.
Mini-feels this week
The long and winding road
I drove my family home from Lewes, near Brighton, yesterday. It's a journey of 170 miles which only took 2:45 on the way there. Yesterday, though, we got stuck in every conceivable traffic jam and Easter tailback and it took 5:30. There's something incredibly oppressive about being on the road for an hour and seeing the total journey time indicator go up as conditions get worse. After hour four I was in some kind of despair-induced breakdown, shouting at the kids and mainlining off-brand energy drinks to try to keep focused as the driving rain battered the windscreen and another red line appeared on my Google Maps route.
Somehow, though, we rallied together (and I put on the Beatles) and for the final hour, I reached roads I knew as the last strains of sunlight appeared in the sky and I raced for home. While swearing I'd never sit in the car again, I brought us home exhausted but happy – what a turnaround.