describe your childhood/teen years
 

what label would you give to yourself during those years? how did you act, etc?

i've been the overachieving kid that somehow, teachers love me because i'm usually done first. i'm really loud outside of class.

i was a bitch in elementary school. i was also obsessed with russian history and only had a few people that were nice to me (and now we're all really close). now it's just "the funny weird girl, jade".

I would give myself the title of "Party Animal". That's all my teen years were, just one big. long party. I did every drug I could get my hands on, but since then, I have wisend up to the stupidity that that leads to. Thank Jah

everyone thought i was a punk in middle school

now, well i dont know.

never had too many friends, always hang out with the same four more or less. I was a morbid kid, we were morbid cos it looked like there was nothing interesting in our town but us.
just like other millions of teenagers, I suffered a lot of the small reality of my town, since there were no stimulating activities.
fortunately, thanks to my parents, I travelled a lot every summer, growing a lot inside, and then the come-back was more and more drastic every time cos nothing in my indigen habitat changed.
lot of boredom then, and some depression too.
I bloomed at 15: thanks to my best friend's brother, we started to go a lot of concerts, and at that age I started to live more indipendently my summers.
I went to london and stayed there one month and a half at 16, and that really chaged my life.
although the flat life of country towns was still the same, I managed to take it easy, exploiting every occasion to go somewhere, travelling a lot by train without tickets.
then with driving license things changed a lot :)
now I live in a bigger town.

in junior school i was the tall scary one, then in secondary school i was the tall funny one, i got voted funniest girl in the yearbook. im at art school now studying photography. i guess now im the tall funny intimidating one.
i spent the ost of my pre-teen years worring about my parents getting divorced, then after they did, i became very angry and moody and pretty much a bitch. i think around 14 is when i started to emerge from that and grow up. i still am a teenager (17) and i still love acting like one, satying out really late, taking as many drugs as i want, not really having many responsibilities. im trying to make the most of it as im 18 in october, and as far as my mums concerned, thats when things have to change.
my only regret is speding far too much time watching tv.

I think every youth of our generation regrets the abuse of television... :)

if i have kids then i think i will get rid of all tv's in the house. they will thank me for it one day.

I elapsed my childhood mainly with my sister Valery 1 year more young then me. we were 2 kinky pests, nobody of our family wanted keep us. then the school change us a little bit specially cause the new friends.I love her!



screamingskull I approve about get rid!

well, my father still sometimes intetionally hides the remote control (do you say like that?) and that really pisses me off...

my Mam died when i was 8 which left my Dad to bring me and my older brother up. i was a very angry kid and this grew into a very rebellious teenager which brought a lot of trouble (not to mention Coppers to the door!) on my poor old Dad.. All is not lost though, i'm 28 now and i've grown into a lovely respectful and peaceful young chap..
Hats off the my Dad, he's my hero and has done a great job bringing me up on his own.

not having a tv kind of puts you off it for life. I've only had tv about half of my life and i honestly never miss it.

elementary school: never got to really play with lots of kids other than my sister because my parents moved so often that i went to 5 different schools between the ages of 6 and 10. got myself kicked out of the one private school i went to. i'll never forget my mom telling them off though.

junior high: same as everyone i imagine. general moping and awkwardness. had to spend much of 8th grade in a wheelchair from a knee injury. that was pretty enlightening in retrospect.

high school: living in a hippieish city at that point and my high school was over-crowded = we had an open campus (aka we could leave during a free period and they wouldn't chase you down the street), so i got perhaps a bit more freedom than some people in small towns. went to class about 80 % of the time, participated in my share of idealist activism/righteous change the world shit (conveniently a lot of protests were during school hours), had my fair share of drugs + rock n' roll, lost my virginity, snuck out and got caught--a lot. started working for people not my family at age 15. but i graduated.

started college at 17, i guess that was still my teen years but a totally different world. no amount of jobs, apartment leases and loans has made me feel like an adult though...still waiting for that

Yea, I feel bad for my lil brother, he's 2 and watches a lot of tv. He's going to have add, like me!!!

In elementary school I was a hyper lil ball of hell for the school, but I had curiously good art capabilities... the only class I've successfully gotten A's in all my life, except maybe gym. Thiss trend continued into middle school, but when I stopped taking ritalin I lost my hyperness and found myself to be a, how would you say, outcast. I listened to a lot of punk music backt then and kinda considered myself one, except not politically... just in the i don't care kinda way. But fuck it, middle school just sucked, at least i never owned a limp bizkit cd.
High school got better, especially the last two years. I kept up in art and started doing ok in school. Had a few girlfriends, started smoking pot, went to a few shows, saw sonic youth... ending weezer's reign over me as my favorite band. Still quiet, but contempt taking in my early punk ideas and deciding that I'm not atheist, I just don't care about anything like that, I'll be a psuedo-buhddo. Played a cover of the velvet underground's "who loves the sun" at a school variety show. This revealed that we kinda sucked, but it was fun.
Now I'm a temporary college dropout hoping to art school and a self-described suburban punk... that still doesn't realyl care about politics... now more so on the grounds, i can't play guitar, but i am anyway.

ok, why not.

i've been bizarre all my life . . . not even bizarre in the typical childlike or teenage sense of the word, just bizarre. i pretty much only had one friend during elementary school, but we were more or less inseparable at the time -- we would do everything from play video games to swim in the pool during the summer to doing "things" (imaginatively called) in which we would pretend we were in certain situations (on a monorail, in a factory, even in a hotel that comprised the entire world). most of my teachers (erroneously) thought i had some sort of mental or emotional issues because i was such a loner -- to the point where i ended up going to counseling because my mom thought my parents' separation and later divorce may have had some effect (it didn't -- i was 5 for god's sake).

as a teenager i was (if possible) even stranger . . . i would do things like wear two different shoes, wear six or seven necklaces simultaneously, refuse to wash my hair for large swaths of time, write self-deprecating nonsense in the back of my notebook, etc. didn't quite know who i was.

now i'm just an argumentative prick. you say it's black? looks brown to me. you say 1 + 1 = 2? i say that might be roundoff error. you say the sky is blue? come on, prove it, you wuss.

I was a little boy who was raised to believe in the Shitstem and the flag salute and all that nonsense, and then day when I was 15, like the Buddha I left the palace and saw the real world.

i suppose my childhood was fairly typical and mundane. things didn't start sucking until middle school. i'm 17 and they haven't stopped (but now i have better music).

i've never been able to classify myself as one thing or another. i don't like the concept of cliques (but secretly love it when i feel like i've been accepted into one) and i can't fully identify with any one of them. i'm not into drawing enough, my taste in music is just a little too odd, i don't like gossiping, or something along those lines. i did find one group of friends that i felt totally comfortable around at my last school (because we all had next to nothing in common with each other) but then my family moved.

throughout my life, i've noticed a social habit that i have. i latch onto 2 or 3 people or groups of people and just hang out with them for months (in some cases, years) at a time before moving on to an entirely different group. i was best friends with a kid named Chris from 2nd to 5th grade, but as soon as we got to middle school, we hardly talked to each other (which is especially odd, because we had alot of the same friends).

i've never been able to fully commit to a single group of friends (i feel like i should be able to) and that kinda bugs me. i'll have two or three seperate crews that i'll hang with at one period of time, but i can't stand it if these groups ever intermingle.

i'm rambling. END.

I was an extra on the set of existance. I was the blank looking guy at the table in the corner.

LONER -

I had a great childhood/teen years. I used to be a mega-extrovert, thinking just about party, music collections and creating, and getting as much of life as possible. However, in a way not to hurt anyone in my surroundings.

Nevertheless, things have changed slightly since university graduation.

my mom died a month ago. it's the same....it made us with dad and brother stick together. now i call dad every evening just to check if he's okay and what he's been doing.

shit, there's nothing more important than family.

I can identify with fishmonkey; my dad died when I was 9, and my sister and I sort of raised hell a bit after that.

I did not have the torturous high school experience that most 'young adults' seem to whine about these days. This sounds conceited, but I was among the academic elite (Note: NOT the same as 'intelligent'), so I had a pretty easy ride. I had a core group of friends of about 5 people that I met my first year of high school, and it's been that way for the most part ever since. Again, this sounds conceited, but we never really clique issues in high school; a lot of people envied us because we could fuck around and not suffer for it, and we weren't "geeks" (you know the geeks i'm talking about - not the ones that were simply outsiders, and who you later recognize were probably way cooler than you will ever be, but the ones who were just plain irritating, didn't wash their hair, made awkward and slightly lecherous passes at you, etc.).

I have one female friend, and the rest are male. I don't get along well with chicks for the most part. I think this has made me a bit crude and lacking in femininity, but oh well.

The thing that helped the most while I was growing up: my mom never restricted me from anything. She let me drink, experiment with drugs, stay out late, etc., because she knew that despite what she said, I'd do it anyhow, and she'd rather I did it with her knowing about it. Because of her approach, I was able to make more informed, intelligent decisions. I learned that my behavior was only in my own self-interest, so I was never moronic and rebellious, getting irresponsibly fucked up/into trouble. My mom knew I smoked pot and experimented with other things (tales for another day), and allowed it, so I never did that subconscious rebellion thing. So for those out there who want to ban their kids from TV, DON'T - they'll plant their asses in front of a television the first chance they get, and become zombies, out of pure denial and rebellion.

I don't smoke much anymore, but a few months back I got my mom to try her first joint ever, and she is now a believer in my contention of the superiority of pot over alcohol. Bless her.