Living out my Teenage Nightmares

Recently, while waiting for the doctor to see me, I read that New York Times article decreeing Gen X a mess. The timing of that article could not have been more fitting. Because it truly feels like I’m regressing at a Benjamin Button pace. Somewhere along the line, I veered off course, my car caught on fire, then took another sharp turn, went careening down a cliff, aflame, with me screaming inside, like something out of a 70s action movie. But instead of blowing up and incinerating me on the spot, it landed in a pit of my own making, slowly burning me alive like Paul Walker (RIP), surrounded by all the bad decisions in my life. Every student loan payment I ignored, everything I put off until tomorrow, all the indecision that rendered me inert, all the self-imposed hibernation, the reminders of my own stupidity and inability to behave like an adult, have come back to be the kindling to the fire that is currently consuming me. I’m a hot garbage mess that feels like a teenager again. Not a teenager insofar that I’ve got the metabolism of a God and my entire life, free of blemishes, in front of me. Nah, girl, I mean teenager as in living a waking nightmare with every day filled to the brim with shame, embarrassment and terrible decisions. I’m spending all my free time loathing myself, and having to relearn all those life-lessons that didn’t stick the first go around. I thought the whole thing with life was that you grew smarter as you got older. Like, thats the payoff? If not smarter, at least wiser? Well thats not the case with me. I certainly don’t feel like that wise old owl snarfing down a tootsie pop, sassing the youth, while wearing his cap and gown. Nope. I’m back to 13 year old me, all while trapped in the body of an almost 40 year old bitter woman who still enjoys the fresh, unisex scent of CK ONE. Woof.

See, Teen Morgan was a lot of things. She was equal parts outgoing and incredibly strange. She was neurotic. Mooney. Hyperaware that she was different. Aside from just being weird in general, I also went through an existential crisis/depression at the tail end of elementary school. A situation which required a lot of therapy. There were different therapists. I had a school therapist. That one was just some Baptist lady doing counseling in her free time, so that she could use those sessions as a way to spread the word of the Lord. She also used a dolphin puppet named Duso to help her drive home any life lessons. It was awful. Then there were the other therapists, trying to calm me down and pin all of my issues on my parents divorce. The adults in my life needed the divorce to be “the thing” that lead me down this path of mental destruction. If it wasn’t the divorce then I was just questioning the world and that would not do! Because If you’re not already aware, adults in the Bible Belt tend to be real freaked out by children who question the nature of reality/eternity/our souls purpose, at a time when they should be pouring over pics of Corey Haim in Tiger Beat. There is nothing a Southern Baptist dislikes more than someone questioning God. Well, actually, they probably dislike gays, women, free choice, and people of color more than that, but depressed children are up there on the list, thats for sure! And so, while my friends were trading their Barbie’s for Cover Girl frosted eyeshadow, I was pretending to be “normal”. Because telling my friends what I was going through wasn’t an option, I really didn’t want to add social pariah to the long list of ailments, I decided that assimilation was the only course of action. So, I sought out advice from the experts. Experts being teen entertainment sources. For social guidance, I chose cinema as my spirit guide. SINGLES shaped what I expected my future to become, and as dark as that is, it aint far off from my reality. I’m a more highly functioning, less talented Cliff! PRETTY IN PINK reinforced how I felt socioeconomically in a town where all my friends were rich, coupled with my inability to get a crush on someone that knew I actually existed. I lived my life like Andi before Blaine came groveling back to her at the Prom. For only child stuff, I read FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC. Not that it taught me anything (other than not eating donuts given to me from my gamma), but it reinforced my opinion that people with siblings have some real fucked up dynamics! And while most of the shit in my life was hot garbage, at least I wasn’t fucking my brother, ya know? And then for the real nitty gritty - the specifics on fashion, culture and most importantly, secret girl health stuff, I turned to the Mt. Everest of “Teen Truth” - tween magazines. Specifically SEVENTEEN, YM and, if I was able to find it in my neck of NE Texas, SASSY. These magazines provided me with all the information I needed on how to present as a “normal", with the added bonus of allowing me to see what life was like outside of the pine curtain of NE Texas. And that was very important given my hometown took off MTV, deeming it too Satanic. I’m not kidding when I say the Baptists ran our town less a like fun, less jazzy, FOOTLOOSE. ,

The B-I-B-L-E, yes thats the book for me!

YM and Seventeen allowed me to get the answers I needed in a neat and tidy way. I didn’t have to out my inner turmoil to my mom, or my friends, or my therapist. Instead, I opened the pages to those glorious magazines, and was given the blueprint as to how I was supposed to behave as a red-blooded Gen X teen. Wanna know what color of Docs would make all the grunge boys swoon? Oxblood, baby. Wanna know what sort of face wash to use to clear up my burgeoning pimples? It’s clean, clear and under control, girl. What to do with your hands when a boy kissed you? Who fucking knows, but you probably shouldn’t keep them rigid at your side like a nightmare Nutcracker, the way I did when I kissed Matt Bean next to his creepy Trans Am. But those geniuses at the mags knew EVERYTHING. All the shit I couldn’t figure out because I was too busy worrying over the fate of my soul due to past life behavior. But what I really took as the word of fucking God, the gold standard of advice, were the articles about girl health. It should also be noted, that at this time I was also operating as a low functioning hypochondriac. Which was super cool and very chill and I would absolutely recommend being a straight weirdo who was clinically depressed AND worried about death 24/7 by age 13. I can’t imagine why I was such a late bloomer since I was such a hip chick! Regardless, I needed to get my medical fix, and since I had exhausted my doctor, and I didn’t have the sort of relationship with my mom that allowed me to have “those” types of conversations, I felt it was best to leave any “girl questions” to the experts at the mags. I guess I assumed all the questions sent into the magazines, from scared, weird girls like me, went to some desk and were opened thoughtfully, one by one, by a white-coated Doctor who’s life passion was to make sure people all over the world had their very important questions answered. Now that I think about it, I bet it was just some rich girl on a summer internship from Smith fielding those super personal notes. Reponses written in between binging Zima’s on the front stoop of someone’s parents brownstone in the Brooklyn Heights. Whatever the case, I took what those magazines said as the absolute facts. When one of them told me a horror story that pre-ejaculate could get you pregnant by like, traveling into your vagina due to a combo of dry humping and underwear shifting, like a hideous game of Oregon trail, with the pre-cum fording the river into your vag, and all the oxen inexpliably surviving and getting your ass pregnant, I BELIEVED THAT THEN, AND HONEST TO GOD, I PROBABLY STILL BELIEVE IT NOW. I will never, not think about that when fooling around with someone. The magazines were really into scaring you straight as far as pregnancy went, probably because they knew a lot of kids only had those articles as their sex-ed. The other thing they drove home was period safety. And specifically Toxic Shock Syndrome. Every month there was some terrifying story about a girl who left her tampon in, got toxic shock AND DIED. And thats not a romantic death. Thats period death! And period death, as every teen knows, is awful and embarrassing and I worried every month about getting TSS. I worried about tampon strength and time said tampon was left inside me. I worried about inserting a tampon on top of another tampon, which was deemed a fate worse than death. And all of those articles and health tips have stuck with me through the teen years, into my twenties, and now late thirties. Which is why I found it so ironic to be reading the article about GEN X being a bunch of directionless hot garbage monsters, while sitting in the Planned Parenthood waiting room because I had inadvertently stuck one tampon in on top of another and forgot about it….I was living a YM “It happened to me” letter to the editor. And I was losing my fucking shit.

I will spare you the nitty gritty, but let me tell you, having a tampon left inside of you for the better part of a month at age 39, with 25 years of tampon use and fear of TSS drilled into you by those aforementioned magazines, is fate far fucking worse than having it happen at age 15. Aside from general, overwhelming mortification, I also had to endure eight tries with a speculum to get to the rogue tampon freed, to no avail. Eventually, after about a half hour of trying to pull Baby Jessica from my well, the doctor had to throw decorum aside and use her hands to fish that fucker out of the sideways position it had taken. A position where it was blocking my cervix and had set up a nightmare pop-up shop. I didn’t give a shit what it felt like, because when I realized I was running a low grade fever, I just knew the next stop was TSS and PERIOD DEATH. And Jesus Christ, with everything that has happened, Period Death was a bridge too far. So I didnt care the method, I just wanted that fucker out by any means necessary. The examination table and area surrounding looked like the set of a SAW movie. By the time the doctor had sent that thing back to Hell from whence it came, we had both seen things that I never, ever, want to think of again. If ever witness anything like that again, I’ll off myself right then and there. I don’t give a shit if its inside a Barnes and Noble, in line at Panera, at children’s dance recital, if I see or smell that again, I’m blowing my brains out immediately. And when it was all done, with my voice hoarse from saying, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry” over and over again, the doctor, who was my age, and I shared a laugh about how this truly was my teen nightmare come to life. And how, despite everything being fine, no TSS, no weird stuff (other than a tampon having been lodged in my cervix), this fucked me up way more than my bionic arm surgery, or second bout of pneumonia that hit a few weeks ago and cause me to chip a tooth from coughing so hard, did. Me having to live out my worst teen nightmare feels like insult to injury at this point.

Because, the reality is, this isn’t the only thing I’ve dealt recently with that feels very “High School”. I’ve gotten terrible crushes on men who definitely didn’t dig me back. I’ve accidentally face-timed a man via the Instagram app, not realizing that was possible, and in my panic, threw my phone across the room while screaming. I’ve had bouts of hating myself and being so insecure about my looks that I’ve refused to be in photos for over two years. I keep thinking its regression, but maybe I actually never grew up in the first place? Maybe I am a directionless Get X monster, and having to reliving all these scenarios, at different points in my life, is the punishment for not behaving like an adult? Maybe being stuck back in the worst part of my teenage years, replaying the same drama and woes and worries, as BEFORE SUNRISE quitely plays in the background, is my version of Purgatory? I dunno. All I know is that this year is only six months in, and I’m terrified to see how the rest pans out for me. I’m either going to win the lottery or be swallowed by a sink-hole. I dont think theres an in-between for me. So, I guess I’ll just keep my seatbelt fastened, douse myself in CK One, blast The Cranberries, and strap in for the rest of this fucking trip.