The author at sixteen
I was a teen with older friends. I was an ambitious teen, making movies and art and proclaiming big outrageous things that were perhaps more often than not obnoxious.
A Portland teenage ballerina queen
But that bluster and bombast didn’t alienate these people in their late 20s and 30s, these friends of mine who rolled their eyes but showed me lots of fantastic things and smuggled me into clubs and actually spoke to me like I made sense. I loved them but didn’t understand how I’d gotten accepted.
Now 28, I finally understand why I had 28 year old friends as a teenager.
18 year old train hopping brother
Maybe it’s a Saturn Return kind of thing. It’s a syncing of life stages. It’s a threshold between tyranny and freedom. As we nearly-thirtysomethings are escaping the poverty, chemical overindulgences, and social scramblings of our early 20s, so are teens escaping the shackles of their parents and lurching towards a new type of life. Independent life. The independent life of eating toast for weeks. Spending your last six dollars on an uncarded single beer. Messing around with people you shouldn’t be messing around with.
Rad looking Portland girl at a skate competition
And what are we 28 year old people lurching towards but the bottom of another ladder? We may not be munching toast and living off of $100 a week anymore, but all our smart ideas and hopes and presumptions at this point— in a decade, will be as relevant and quaint as Friendster in 2010.
Teens sketching out life schedules during a research project
This is where things sync, and here’s why 28 yr olds can and should learn from teens. Teens are smart and cool and clever and unafraid to fucking dream way fucking big. They face fear daily: Wardrobe. Friendship. Parental units. Feelings. Bodies. Futures. Grades. Everything. Fear and future are facts of life that teens deal with in a most manic manner.
Style obsessed teens shopping in Santa Monica
It means the world and it isn’t anything. The biggest things are horrendously terrifying and the smallest issues are crucial. Yet nothing really matters yet, does it?
Untarnished, fresh, erudite, bold, proudly clever. These are the teens I’ve met recently. Their naivete regarding the horrible early twenties experience in store is absolutely refreshing, a reminder to never take anything too seriously, because it’s gonna keep getting tougher and more intricate and achy and wrinkly and you better enjoy the fuck out of what you have now.
ALL PHOTOS TAKEN BY ME. EXCEPT THE ONE OF ME THAT MY FRIEND ERIN TOOK 12 YEARS AGO. TEENS SHOULD NOT HAVE THEIR FACES ALL UP ONLINE SO THEY HAVE BEEN CROPPED AND EDITED TO PRESERVE ANONYMOUS-NESS. EXCEPT FOR MY BROTHER, WHO PROBABLY DOESN’T CARE.