And I agree with both your points and Stupendousness’s.

Stupendous, I hope you’ve saved that comment of yours to your own computer–it’s an awfully good mini-biography that you might want to have sometime. I’m still impressed with your ability at a young age to stand outside yourself and watch your mental processes unfold. That is really unusual.

Our society doesn’t build much of anything around the principles of cognitive development. Stupendousness’ insomnia was probably aggravated by an early high school start time, when we *know* teenagers go to sleep and wake up later than children and adults do. Abstinence-only education when our hormones are about as messed up and confusing as they get? Nice.

Anyway, so I knew by my late teens that teenagers take more risks, are not so in control of their emotions, and that sleep is very important, among other things. The last two were of great concern to me because my mother and I were not getting along due to neither of us controlling our emotional outbursts (me: teenager, her: bipolar), and I developed insomnia at age 16. That’s why, when I moved away at age 18 and was still feeling extremely cynical, pessimistic, and generally bitchy at the world, I knew I was going to have to put forth great effort to rein in the impulse to think negatively. I was afraid that having been pissed off for the majority of my teenage years may have hardwired that mindset as my permanent personality. Not living with my mom made this goal much easier to attain, and I feel I was pretty successful by age 21 (I can bring out The Bitch when needed though).

I no longer have horrible insomnia, but I believe, without any hard proof, that it permanently degraded my memorization ability. I was an all-A honor student who didn’t have to work too hard at school from pre-K through grade 9. I hope that doesn’t sound like bragging because I know it was pure genetic good fortune. Then I started struggling big time, not being able to memorize worth a damn, and that turning point coincided with an illness that may have been meningitis and the beginning of the insomnia close to my 16th birthday.

Once I reached university courses in which the majority of the assignments were essays or research papers that required critical thinking and analysis with little memorization, I did great, despite still having insomnia. I sleep so much better now, but I rely on written lists to keep me on track.

So that’s all of the very subjective data I had that has informed my behavior. I’ve never been a big risk-taker or one to cave to peer pressure (actually, being pressured to do something makes me NOT want to do it even more), and I’m not sure if that was also due to genetics or my parents not sheltering or coddling me. For example, they assumed their kids would get drunk while underage at some point, just like they did, so they only encouraged us to do so as safely as possible. I ended up not drinking alcohol as a minor or doing any drugs ever. I got drunk for the first time at age 20-something but not pass-out drunk.

However, I did take some risks when it came to relationships, especially concerning physical intimacy. At age 16 and 17, my hormones were full steam ahead, and I clearly remember having almost out-of-body experiences during heavy make-out sessions, thinking to myself, “Do I really have my hands down this guy’s pants?! WTF am I doing?” and having a very difficult time stopping myself, though I did before doing anything I regretted. My emotional feelings definitely made things complicated because I had no clue how to parse my physical and emotional desires from each other. As in, do I love this guy because he makes me so horny? Or am I just so damn horny that I’m mistaking it for love? No teenager understands that stuff, and I wish someone had talked to me about emotional intimacy in addition to standard sex-ed (though I am grateful for the thorough physical health-related sex educated I did get). I knew the health risks of being sexually active, but I had no clue about the mental health risks associated with the same. That’s why I so despise the state of sex education. Not only do we let teenagers run loose with raging hormones and little information about their own bodies, we also fail to talk to them about the things they have on their minds and the psychological wringers they will be going through in the next decade. I’m not sure a school is the best place to impart this knowledge; I would hope that we adults who have already traversed through the teenage years and 20s could relate our experiences (without embarrassing details, if desired) to the younger generations. That’s my plan for my own future child, even my nieces. I wouldn’t dictate to them, as in “This is what you are or will be feeling…” but more like, “This is what I felt and did and what I was thinking at the time. This is what my friends were dealing with. I hope you feel you can talk to me about what’s on your mind because I probably can relate and will not judge you.”

/hogging your comment section