JTK says - juicy intrigue from my teenage years

I don't think you can go back

It's weird, I'd say I'm not one of those people with much in the way of "life mottos" but as close as I get may be the belief that you can't go back. I don't think you can go back to old places, relationships, etc. Maybe you technically can, you can physically orient yourself to the place, you can pick up the phone and call the person. But either you've changed, they've changed, or the experience of experiencing them the first time has changed whatever you'll get this time around. For this reason, I've never boomeranged jobs even though I've been tempted once or twice, and I'm not the one to pick up the phone and call an ex even if they cross my mind.

But this week, I am breaking my rule ever so slightly to go back in spirit. I've been rereading journals from my teen years and they are illuminating, hilarious, and hilariously bad (poetry, oy).

For anyone who didn't write religiously and doesn't get to have this experience, enjoy through me hearing what dumbasses teenagers were and I assume continue to be.

So for starters, I was really a wild child

My parents moved me out of Baltimore to a snotty suburb where I would finish out my teen years. Our boredom as small-town teens was so great that people would just hang out in the Taco Bell parking lot on weekends and we'd do stuff like jumping off a reservoir bridge for fun. (In retrospect I'm nervous even THINKING about that one, we could totally have jumped in the wrong spot and been smushed like bugs).

The list of my other crimes is long and random.

We'd go skinny dipping in random neighbors' hot tubs when people had house parties. Me and my friends used to drink beer and climb onto our old middle school and cavort around the roof. This one is completely cringey, but there was a phase I went through with one friend group where we kept stealing signs - there was some realtor in my area who shared my (uncommon) first name and I'd steal her signs because my name was on them.

Hilariously, at one point I felt that friend group was "immature" and underwent a friend breakup with them. They threatened to call the cops on me for still possessing the signs I had from our shared looting. Humiliated, I had to tell my dad my predicament and he drove me out to RESTORE the sign in an utterly embarrassing reverse-heist. (My dad, what a mensch. These ex-friends had kept a shopping bag with $200 of clothes I'd just bought and he said "considering you lost two friends and hundreds of dollars of clothing, I think you've been punished enough").

My family was a lot worse than I remembered

Now some people may find it distasteful for me to talk about family so openly but I truly dgaf and have no shame, so here we go. My family suspects my mother has undiagnosed borderline personality disorder, I'm not in touch with her, and my father divorced her for mistreating me. He got full custody of the minor children, my sister was already of legal age at college.

I really forgot how utterly wild and erratic her behavior was during this time period. I feel honestly very bad for my younger self. I stopped talking to her during the divorce since I testified about her in court as part of my dad getting full custody. I remember being proud I didn't cry and spoke calmly to the judge. With her gone, I will say my grades and behavior improved dramatically both in my memory and in my writing at the time.

In an entreaty to get me talking to her again, she roped me into a trip she was taking to Belize in 2007 through a local community college. Although I remained cynical about her, I was interested in seeing the world and took a single class at the community college so I could also participate. During this time my dad was also supposed to be selling the house they'd bought together, and through nosiness reading a legal document dropped at my door I found out she was suing my dad for the house not going on the market fast enough and also making outrageous claims about the house being unsanitary that were patently false in the lawsuit. Directly lifted from the journals, I wrote of the time:

I got in a fight with my mom I can barely stand to think about. I reminded her she had said she was going to get my passport for my 17th birthday for the trip and said she wasn't going to eat for a week paying for it. What the f@#$. You should need a certificate saying you've been examined and found sane before you are allowed to have children

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I see my moms car at the house, of course she walked in like she owned the joint seeing my dad's car wasn't in the driveway. She came in and she did it to see how far he'd gotten on home repairs. She comments in the car, 'you like the new furniture?' backhanded @#$%%. Layers question on question with a freshly brewed pot of judgment. Her offhand comments are a language I can decode and she doesn't realize. I said, 'You're really nosy about the house' and she of course went off. I left her still talking 60mph trying to cram her words down my throat

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Mom picked me up to go to a <community college trip abroad> planning meeting and I found out she had a party to go to afterwards and I needed to be back home to help dad paint so I said 'You're taking me back to the house after the meeting right?' and she said 'No, if you want to go back your dad needs to get you.'

I said, 'He can't, its his birthday and he's doing stuff to get the house ready to sell, I'm supposed to go back to help him' and she said 'tough luck'. So I got mad and said 'You're going to SUE him for not having the house ready to sell in time and then actively stop me from helping get it ready?' and I blanked out a little bit but she went crazy and named all the ways he was forcing her to do this and how everything was his fault.

So I replied 'Oh so its HIS FAULT you lied about the house in that lawsuit?' which enraged her, her eyes got that uneven look and she was driving erratically. Screaming at me, lots of screaming. I said 'Don't scream at me, I'm not yelling at you'. More angry yelling about how I had 'some nerve'. She alternately spits sparks about dad turning me against her and my presumptuousness for saying she lied. She's screaming, I'm deadpan responding 'yup' just ignoring her. Lava, molten words from her, and I nonchalantly answer 'whatever'.

She pulls into the driveway of her friend's house and says the trip is off and she's not taking me. She tells me to get out of the car and I say no. The book on borderline personality says they hate hearing no, seems like it. She tells me to get out again and I say no and then she gets out and opens my door and I don't want it to come to blows so I finally leave.

I walk away from her friends house, even though I don't like <friend> she and my dad have the same birthday and I don't feel like ruining hers. My mom rears her head and roars "Where the HELL are you going, gets in her car and follows me. Where the hell am I going, she demands. I turn around and give her a long look, and keep walking. I pull my sunglasses over my eyes because that @#$% made me cry and I don't want her to see it. I remember the bigger highway we drove by getting to her friends house and after I calm down and find my way back to the Exxon station. <Sister> finally comes to get me. She's really upset

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My mom emails my dad and says I 'chose' to get out of the car. She says she wants a 'dialogue' with me. What. The. F@#$. She can shove her dialogue. <Brother> says mom may try to start with me while we're on the <community college trip abroad>. I don't care. Today I sent her the letter I'd been writing, where I tell her she's unstable and throws temper tantrums. I said we have no relationship and it is of no concern to me. I told her her behavior was ridiculous and not to contact me again

So as a sidebar, like yes I assume teenage me was an unreliable narrator, yes I assume the drama factor is up to a million in some of these posts. In one, I hilariously write I HATE EVERY SINGLE PARENT WHO EVER EXISTED IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. That truly made me laugh, just the epitome of teenage emotion. But I wouldn't have fabricated events and even grading on a curve for drama, reading that retelling about gave me a migraine.

I was seventeen and recognized how transparent and frankly childish she was. That wasn't my responsibility. I was the one who had to face her over and over again until my parents divorced, and for whatever reason I still brought out the worst in her again and again and had to deal with a lot more in this vein of ridiculousness each time she lost it.

It also made me sad realizing, I used to check her eyes. She had a rare eye condition and somehow my young brain connected a certain lack of responsiveness in her eyes with her foul moods which would strike the whole house silent in fear. I used to check my eyes to see if I was crazy, I thought I could tell if I somehow was marked and would become like her. (As an adult, I realize there is actually a lot of nasty messaging about physical appearance and disability and morality, like that Disney villains may have physical impairments or be otherwise coded as physically abnormal. So I don't love that I thought her eye problem and mood problems were somehow connected and feared it and I recognize the ableism in that entire line of thought. But when I had this theory, I was far too young to have any idea - this started at I don't know, eight nine years old. But so when I talk about her 'uneven eyes' that even for me had a very specific fear response it would invoke. She was terrifying).

A happy ending on the trip. Terrified, I contacted the trip organizers and said my mom no longer supported me going but my dad was my legal guardian and still was on board. I was only 17, the youngest on the trip, so there had to be legal paperwork about it. My mom was always a coward if ever her behavior risked coming to light outside my family and wound up backing out of the trip so I got to go there alone and not have to face her, which I thought was a possibility but I was determined to go anyway. When there, they noticed that I could draw and invited me to paint a mural on the school we volunteered at. That experience changed me so much and I'm so glad I got to have it.

Funner stuff! Emo girl musings and random sass

Although because of the heavy elements I don't know that I could read something like this all at once (I've read a couple journals over several weeks already) there are ample hilarious moments within. I was a truly funny kid, I'll say although I'm of course biased. I had so much chutzpah, my god.

At one point when I was about 18 I worked at a fancy-shmancy restaurant. I describe my 40 year old boss there explaining his theory of why sexual harrassment shouldn't be a "thing" - people should get whatever response they get for their comments but not be ostracized I think was his point.

I responded so you think if a twelve year old is full-figured people should be able to comment on that? and he answered if it's of note, sure. In response I just said Thats the stupidest f@$#ing thing I've ever heard lolol. So ballsy, so fearless.

I also had numerous sad-artsy-girl asides, like this head-scratcher. Have no idea what it was about:

Once that feeling was gone, I'll be the same shell. This summer the whole world was the exact perfect temperature for my skin and I owned the sugared dew on my lips and every green leaf. Now like optical illusions my black eyelids see vivids of inverse, a cool night world full of dead trees I owe no allegiance.

This one I do, it was about our art teacher:

Caitlin always told me Mrs. D was a bitch but she really isn't. She isn't immediately nice, her niceness comes in small sharded pieces she hands over slowly.

Some of it was also grimly funny:

Simply living through hardships isn't strength, its buoyancy.

Basically life is chewing me up and spitting me out, in all likelihood because I am bitter.

All in all, the kids are alright as they say

I don't know that anything earth-shattering has come from my blast from the past but I have gotten a kick out of it. There were some surprises in there and a number of things I remembered differently or not at all but think are more accurate in the fresh retelling/journal version.

I'm not sure how fast I'll get through the rest of them but so far enjoying the ride.

I'll try to be back next time with a more normal format newsletter, or hey if people find my miscreant teenage years interesting could potentially do another one of these lmao. See you next time!