Identity Crisis... 21st June 09, 10.00 am

I was traveling to Vadodara for the first time yesterday and there’s this teenage girl who I spotted sitting on my seat. Dressed in yellow shirt, loose jeans, short cropped hair, slight signs of mustache above her lips and spectacles a tad bit too large for her little face.
Just as I told her that she was sitting on my seat, I realized I had committed a blunder! Her face shrunk, she grabbed her bag, fumbled inside to look for her ticket and realized that she had made a mistake. She had the most crucifying look on her face, got up from her seat and sat at the aisle seat.
She had an awkward smile on her face for the next twenty minutes and largely had her head buried into her news paper for the rest of the travel. To me it was a small unnoticeable mistake...to her it was probably an error she would think of for the next few hours, if not more. I smile to myself. I was reminded of my own times as a gawky little teenager, always wanting to be treated as an adult when I was not. It’s a perpetual identity crisis! And I hated it when the older, beautiful women would not notice me and I wasn’t in ‘that’ league.
When I look back at those times, I never want to go back to them. Not that those times were not good. They were; the dolls ( Though I did not play with dolls too much!),friends at school, dance, cycling in the evenings; it had its own charm. But they were turbulent times.
Remember all that? The hairy hands that cannot be waxed, crushes that you do not understand, small tiffs with friends which will mentally push you to the bottom of the pit?
It is not that the same situations do not arise or exist today. They do. Rather some of them have gotten more complicated. Hair needs to be painfully waxed, crushes become complex relationships and tiffs at times become serious misunderstandings!
However, as we grow up, I think there are a few things that make us equipped to deal with situations better.
One of them is the simple awareness that what is happening is normal and that every one encounters these situations in life. The knowledge that you are no special makes you feel at ease and deal with things a lot better. So while the kid thinks that the situation is unique and why did such a thing have to happen, you know it’s just one of those.

Another tool is our gradually evolved comfort with who we are. The clothes we were, the language we speak, our choice of songs, what we want to do, the realization that you may not want to top in studies even though you have been told that’s the best thing ever! You develop your own comfort levels and style with time.

But the biggest realization which makes adults deal better with situations than the kids is that everything… everything that we go through is transitory. Bad moods, back aches, good friends, the girl you hated in school, hubby squabbles, this good moment, PMSing(!), everything will pass if you let it.

In India, the tendency to treat teenagers as kids is far more pronounced. It is not too surprising when even the thirty five year olds are instructed on how to spend their money and stuffed with food by mommies who ‘know’ what’s best for their bacchas! Looking back I think teenagers would like it better if parents/ elders around treated them more as adults than as kids. That would mean more of reasoning than instructions. It would sometimes also mean sometimes just letting them be! Encourage them to try and explore everything but tell them the pros and cons of it.

They would fumble, flounder but would emerge far stronger and independent headed than they were before. This is in no way to undermine the positive influence the parents and other elders have on their teenagers. All that is imperative to instill the right values in them but sometimes, it is important to just let go.

Not fuss over like the air hostess on the plain was doing with the girl next to me, asking her several times if she was traveling alone and that if she needed anything. I felt like saying “Will you let her alone, she would tell you if she needed anything!”

As I looked at her, the girl still had her head deeply buried into the same page of the news paper. Her desire to look and behave like an adult, somewhere betraying her need to be one.

I smiled to myself ( It was almost a mean feeling of being in a better situation) and looked out of the window.