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Today, while waiting in the reception area
at my salon, I stumbled into a Seventeen Magazine. It's been ages since I'd seen, much less read, one and I picked it up
with some degree of interest. I remembered how this was my
"must-read" as a teenager. I
would save up my lunch money to be able to buy a copy (Tiger Beat was a distant
second. Those I'd borrow).
As I
thumbed through the magazine, various articles caught my eye. The featured article
was how to deal with your friend(s) no longer being that into you. That took me
back. I remembered how soul-crushing
that was as a teenager – “She was my best friend! Who do I talk to now?".
There was another article that addressed the questions surrounding teenage sex
which even spoke of oral sex. And, even as I lowered my raised eyebrows, I
admitted to myself that teens needed that kind of frank discussion rather than
half-truths garnered from friends and self-serving "partners".
However, the thing that surprised me the most
was my appreciation of the fashion. I wondered if I was perhaps channelling Betsey Johnson, the
preternaturally youthful, septuagenarian fashion designer known for her
"over-the-top" designs (and her cartwheels at the end of her fashion
shows). The clothes in the magazine were fresh and fun! The shoes (I have a
weakness for fashion forward shoes) were fabulous – covering the gamut from
conservative to outlandish. I could see myself actually wearing some of those
items in a heartbeat. And that’s the
funny thing. Back when I was a teenager, even though I was a smaller dress size
then than I am now, I would never consider wearing ANY of that. I was SO self-conscious
about being overweight and not cute (it didn’t help that I wore glasses and my
hair was FAR from being “cool”).
So what happened in the decades since my
teens? I believe, quite frankly, I’ve grown into myself. I’ve learned that
worrying, wondering what others think of you, and my trying to fit into their
self-serving boxes, isn’t worth it. My friends laugh when, at each birthday, I say
it’s my 25th birthday (On my last birthday, one friend joked that
based on my “current age”, we met at UWI when I was minus two years-old. LOL). But for me, it’s not a case of trying to
seem young (seriously – I can’t pass for 25 AT ALL). Rather, it’s a case of
still being in that phase of life beyond the debilitating self-consciousness of
my teen years and the generally, incapacitating “afraid-to-try-something-new” of the middle years. More Magazine speaks of Second Acts and Reinventing
Yourself. I prefer to think of what I’m doing now as shucking the husk of who I’m
supposed to be and engaging me.
I’m rather happy I ran into that copy of Seventeen Magazine today. It gave me a chance to revisit a time I’d forgotten and see how
well I’d developed. It gave me a chance to say, truthfully to myself, “You’ve
come a LONG way, baby”
