In the seventh grade, there was this boy. There are a lot of “boys” at that age, but he was different. He was the only guy I ever truly liked, because we shared a similar, more mature, mindset. We were always together, and he made me feel like I was supposed to be in his life. But I was sure I’d never get to be with…
Scrolling through Instagram in bed a few months ago, I saw a picture of my friend Anthony*. Before my brain processed who I was looking at, I felt a shock up and down my spine. Anthony has been dead for almost six years. For a moment, he was alive again, posting on Instagram.
The bully moved to town in fourth grade, when social groups were already solidified and best friends were already established. As memory serves, he was the main antagonist in all my middle school stories. Legend has it that on his first day, he made his grand entrance by slipping and falling on a single Kleenex on the…
Of all the emotions, it’s humiliation that scars the most deeply. The memory of an embarrassing moment that happened decades ago can still stop a person in their tracks and devastate them for days, weeks, or even a lifetime.
Throughout my teen years, I went to a small K-12 school in Kentucky where the bulk of my peers wore more-or-less the same kind of thing, had more-or-less the same kind of hair, and attended my bat mitzvah with the ginger politeness of child snorklers encountering their first manta rays. Being a somewhat overeager…
Having just moved back into my childhood bedroom in my parents’ house after graduating college, I’m in a whirlwind process of going through all of my old stuff. I was always the kind of person to start a diary, write in it for maybe a week, and then give up, which is why I’ve come across a bunch of barely-used…
Everyone had their spot. They were the places we went to chill, escape or eat, to laugh, make out or decompress, to rant about life-altering events and basically live out our lives free from stressful adults. In honor of Teen Week, these are the memorable places the Jezebel staff frequented as teens, either alone or…
You really would not have been able to tell, from my barely touched and poorly-written teen diaries, that writing was an activity I would someday be paid for. I averaged about two entries per entire journal, and at some point stuffed them all into a large metal lockbox to hide them from my parents and lost the key.
Teens today have never known a world where HIV was a certain death sentence. They missed the “plague years” of AIDS—the confusion, the pop-cultural discussions, the general feeling of hopelessness regarding the disease. This is sometimes referred to as “historical privilege.” It means that through no fault of their…
When Focus on the Family launched Brio, a publication aimed at Christian teen girls in 1990, it was destined for success. The magazine—which recently relaunched after a hiatus—published for nearly two decades, benefitting from the renaissance of the teen girl magazine. Sassy had debuted in 1988, and by the time Brio…
I was 17 years old when I first experimented with LSD, late one weekend night while my mom was at work at one of her several jobs. Somehow I had procured a few hits of microdot acid, and with my two best friends—whose names are obscured here because they now have jobs and husbands and children and shit—we proceeded to…
Animals, they’re just like us: they breathe, they eat, they like rubbing their genitals on things, they look cool in sunglasses, they die. But sometimes before that, they go through a period of adolescence that has a few things in common with what we associate with human adolescence. Aside from the sexual activity and…
Tough as it may be for the modern teen to believe, once upon a time—back in the technological dark ages—we did not have easy access to Google and anatomically detailed fan fiction and high-speed internet porn and slow-motion Tumblr GIFs to satisfy our consuming curiosity about the human body. Instead, we were forced…
A question inspired by Teen Week 2017: Do teens still drive around with large binders full of CDs?
When I met Sarah Shamoon, I asked her what she was up to this summer like I was a cool adult trying to make a teen feel comfortable. This was a question I had known the answer to hours before, but had spontaneously forgotten, and was expecting to hear that she was participating in a teen-appropriate summer job or…
At an “Oktoberfest” carnival in 8th grade, I met a boy with blonde tips who was in an awful band and had a reputation as an exceptionally fast swimmer. Immediately, I was in love. We sat down on a grassy hill and he asked me if I liked the Smashing Pumpkins. I said “Yes!”, even though I had no idea who the Smashing…
As a teen, you could have read the wholesome Seventeen magazine for a lot of reasons. Maybe it was the tasteful fashion spreads pulled from mall outlets that were actual affordable. Or perhaps you memorized the stories from clean-cut boys on what they look for in a dream date. But for the more deranged among us, there…
Some people have a lot of personal or family adolescent traditions, customs centered around summer camp reunions, Hebrew school, or post-soccer ice cream treats. I only have one personal tradition, and it’s watching a four-minute-and-23-second musical YouTube montage of the romantic odyssey of two characters I don’t…
I spent a huge amount of high school wishing I had a boyfriend and self-consciously pretending I didn’t care about boys at the same time. Boys’ disinterest in me was near total, and I told myself not to sweat it because I was just wise beyond my years or perhaps intimidating to them, neither of which was remotely…
