My teenage years were not, like those of many others, the easiest. To say the very least. Hindsight is a wonderful if useless thing, but if the teenage years weren’t the easiest we are often still carrying the scars decades later. But, with that hindsight, I would offer my teenage self the following advice.
I guess our teenage years start at 13 officially, but for the purposes of this article/blog, I am going to start it at 10. Simply because that was the age at which my perfect (in my eyes) little world began to fall apart. Up until the age of 10 I was the archetypal Daddy’s Girl. I had an inbuilt insecurity which I’m not entirely sure I understand, but other than that I was the adored surviving child (my brother had died of SIDS just before my birth) and grandchild. My parents had, what I now recognise as, the most intense chemistry. Everyone remarked, I recall, at their happiness. What a perfect couple they were. Until they weren’t. Because it turned out that underneath that chemistry was a burning resentment from my father that my mother’s business brought in more money than his salary as a policeman. That, coupled with associating with a group of people (police) who, in the ’70s were hardened and brutal frankly and thought nothing of having regular affairs, spelled the end of their marriage. In short, my father was a riot policeman and in the first few years after Margaret Thatcher came to power, there were a lot of riots especially in inner city London where he was based. In one particularly brutal riot (where a policeman was murdered by decapitation), he had a brick thrown in his face and he lost several teeth as a result. He was sent to a particular hospital where he met a senior nurse, and it all went from there. They had an affair, and he left. My little world was shattered.
It wasn’t just that he left. It was that he became violent towards my mother after leaving. Throwing her out of a moving car. Bending the fingers on her hands back so much the tendons were at best strained – she was a hairdresser and in the end, had to give it up because of the damage he caused. He raped her while I was in the house. I have never spoken to her about that, but I heard everything. The list goes on and is horrific. This was not the father I remembered, not the man I had adored. When he left he told me I would see him regularly, that for me nothing much would change. Well, because his new partner deemed me a ‘threat to their happiness’ that ended up being every three weeks on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon when she was at work so she wouldn’t know he was seeing me. A lot went on, a huge amount of nastiness and unpleasantness and my mother was wrung dry by it all. He said he would pay his share, he didn’t and we had bailiffs at the door. That sort of thing. Money was scarce to the point where I remember opening the fridge door and there only being eggs and milk. We couldn’t afford anything else – my mother had sold her business a year before he left because he had suggested that she might want to stay at home with me more. When he left, he cleared their joint account which had included the proceeds of the sale of her business. To say life was difficult would be the understatement of the century. By the end of October 1981, for reasons too lengthy to go into here, he stopped seeing me altogether. The occasional letter, perhaps a phone call but no face-to-face visits. On his birthday the following January, I went to where he lived, and gave him a present. He made me stand on the doorstep. After that, except for one get together for Father’s Day in 1983, I never saw him again. 42 years later and I still haven’t. The impact on me has been profound.
As a teenager, I realise now I felt unworthy and unlovable. Not only did I lose him, I lost all his family as well. All the aunts, uncles, and cousins and a grandmother (the latter being no real loss in all honesty). But an entire half of my family not seen again. I don’t truly know why, I’ve never asked and I’ve never tried to get in contact with them as an adult. But the life I had been used to up to that point had been wiped out. Looking back, I think I was in a form of shock because for a while the hits just kept on coming. My mum had probably had something of a breakdown during those early, awful, months and had attempted suicide twice. I realise now, I really resented her for that. If she had been successful, what would have happened to me? It felt like another parental abandonment and, thinking about it now, I don’t think I have fully recovered from that. I know that, deep down, I don’t fully trust her still. But the advice I would give me as a teenager is that, as much as it feels it’s about you, it isn’t. It is absolutely about them. These were two people who met at 17/18, married at 19/20 and were divorced by 35/36 though they split when they were 32/33. While to me they seemed grown up and mature (of course), they weren’t. They were emotionally immature and neither knew how to deal with tough times as neither had been exposed to them during their own childhoods. They didn’t know their own strength or resilience in these types of situations. Of course, they had been through a huge amount when my brother died – which I don’t think either recovered from fully – but they were not particularly emotionally self-aware, and certainly my mother was reeling from what he had done and was doing to her. Yes, I would advise my teenage self, you are collateral damage unfortunately, but their behaviour is no reflection on you at all but is simply a reflection on themselves and the times and society they lived in. You are loved and you are lovable. You are more than worthy of all of that. Don’t allow the guilt and trauma of two people tell you any different.
I was the only child I knew whose parents were separated and divorced. It didn’t make me ‘exotic’, it made me a prime target for bullying. I had shrunk into myself, spending a lot of time on my own and completely unable to absorb the enormity of what was going on around me. Luckily, I had wonderful grandparents I could escape to, but my best friend was equally damaged by her upbringing albeit for different reasons, and we couldn’t really be the ports each of us needed in the storms of our lives. We were too young and didn’t understand what was happening inside us enough to articulate it in a way that was helpful. Instead, we escaped into a world of story-telling through toys like Barbie, which we played with far longer into our teenage years than would be normal. But, our stories were all about happy ever afters. The kind we desperately wanted in our own families and could only articulate through this play. I felt it was a guilty secret, really. We were playing with dolls until we were 14 or 15, and I know I felt ashamed of it. I knew I was too old to do this, but I loved the escapism. We would either play with dolls or we would go for endless walks in the evenings. When I think about it now, two teenage girls walking the streets of the East End of London was a potential recipe for disaster – our Guardian Angels were almost certainly working overtime with some of the things we encountered! But we were pretty street smart, and knew when to run. Again, those walks were about escapism. We would talk endlessly about our days (we went to different schools), but I don’t think I ever admitted to her about the bullying. I would tell teenage me that while I might not want to share about the playing with dolls, it was certainly cathartic and there is nothing wrong with escapism. That my story telling was an early indicator that I could be a writer later in life. Something I know even then would have made me inordinately happy.
The bullying was something else I was incredibly ashamed of. The social isolation because my mother had sent me to a private school and I just didn’t match up to many of the others there in terms of having a ‘perfect’ nuclear family and comfortable financial lives. Sometimes the outright nasty violence. The name calling. Yes, it was sometimes a struggle to go to school every day. It didn’t help that I was clever. I got the top grades in my favourite subjects, always. It was like catnip to the bullies. So, I downplayed my intelligence. I was too competitive to not keep getting the grades, but I allowed myself to slip in the subjects I didn’t like (sciences mostly) so that I could point to that as proof that I wasn’t that clever. And I’ve done it ever since, never truly believed in my intelligence because I allowed the lack belief to get cemented into my subconscious. It’s tricky, giving advice to my teenage self on this issue. The truth is, most of these children didn’t have that perfect family life. They were struggling silently too. Not all of them, some of them were just nasty, but many of them were it turns out since. It was just that my parents had done what was then still not completely socially acceptable, and separated, meaning I stood out more. So, I would advise a level of sympathy and empathy for those children. It’s the advice I have given my own son at times, and the impact of doing so has been quite profound on the other children. In a positive way. I would advise my teenage self to not be ashamed of my intelligence, to just keep on plugging away at the school work because the rewards would be there in the long term. As teenagers, we never look at the long term impact. Impulse control during the storm of puberty (yes, that hit me hard too because of genetic issues) is never easy. But, with hindsight, I would advise teenage me to keep going. I was lucky, when I got on the bus home from school my torment ended. I wasn’t plagued by cyber bullying and my school wasn’t the one round the corner. So I did get to escape. But, again, I would tell myself it wasn’t me. To focus on the friendships I did have rather than the people who were bullying me. That I was liked by people, loved even by friends. That letting them in wasn’t a bad thing.
That is another piece of advice I would give teenage me. That I should let my friends get close to me. I realise now there was a huge wall around me, keeping most people at arms length. I just didn’t have it in me at a subconscious level to let people get close. That was the route to heartbreak and I just couldn’t do it. It got worse when my beloved grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack when I just turned 16, then my beloved uncle died the same way a year later. And my first love broke my heart six months after that. From the ages of 10-17, I was battered by life. I never saw a therapist or counsellor, it was never addressed and barely spoken of. I suppressed so many emotions it’s frightening really. And as a consequence, I became someone who never felt they truly fitted in so tried being the square to fit in the hole and not embracing the round peg I was. And still am. I became closed off, hardened, intensely insecure, and tremendously unhappy. I thought I was too trusting when the reality was, I didn’t trust anyone. I thought I got close to people too quickly when the truth was, I could walk away very often without a second glance. Fundamentally, though, the advice I would give teenage me is to not focus on what I didn’t have, but to focus on what I did. Because I did have amazing grandparents, I had a mother who fought back from the brink and we became a unit, a best friend who was there for me in many ways, just by being there, and for whom I was there too, school friends who were genuinely nice, clever people. I wasn’t as fat as I thought I was, far from it when I look back at photos. I was a pretty girl when I look back, not the ugly person the bullies led me to believe. I would advise teenage me to focus on the positives. To focus on a bright future if I wanted one because it was all there ahead of me. To let the memories of my father go, he was long gone and didn’t deserve me anymore. That by holding onto the hurt and pain the only loser in life was going to be me. To ask for help, professional help, to work through all of this so that I could emerge into adulthood more well-rounded than I did.
Unfortunately, that advice wasn’t available to me as a teenager. That said, as I write this I realise that I have done all the work on myself now, and I am in a much better place. It has taken me years, it’s still ongoing. But I wouldn’t be where I am today without it, and to be honest I wouldn’t change where I am today. Because I have a bright future ahead of me, one I doubt I would have found otherwise. And it’s a future that I am aligned with at a soul-deep level. So, sometimes, maybe the pain is worth it. And fundamentally, I now feel that if I can help one person as a consequence of that pain and anguish, and I have, then it was definitely worth it.
Louisa Simpson 