I've read some of the items in this conference... hoping to find that I was
*normal*, if such a word exists, and seeing that I have the same misgivings
as other teens. However, I have found that this conference is mostly used by
people (adults) wishing to gain there childhood back. Either that or adults
who had a miserable childhood and want to gripe about it here in this
conference. Is there anyone out there who is *in-between* the two types of
persons I just mentioned? Or is there anyone who can help me?

Why do I feel like I don't fit in? Why do I feel so "out of touch" while I
view most of my peers as too immature? Why can't I wait to get out of this
place so I can finally live up to the potential that has been building up
inside me for as long as I can remember? I want and am capable than far
much more than anyone will give me credit and I feel as if I'm about to
break. Is there any other teens that can help me? Is there anyone out
there that has gone through all this before and could maybe lend some
words of encouragement? If so, please respond.

- Robert     o/~

36 responses total.

        This conference has been inactive for a while, but most of us who have
been participating in it are teenagers, or in the case of those who aren't,
are really close to that.
        I think I've gone through a lot of what you're describing.  My advice
is just to start doing the things that people won't give you credit for being
able to do, and sooner or later they will catch on.

the orgional cf was started by a couple of teenagres...the younger of which 
just graduated from highschool...but when he started it, they were teenagers.
yes, alot of us are older...but some of us still can see from the younger eyes.
(i'm 19...i remember a lot about highschool ,and the hell that it was.  :)
steve and i are hoping to put some life into this cf, but we've just started
to discuss what we think needs to be done, and we are both kinda clueless.
i want to bring in the new, younger grexers, but am not really sure how to 
draw them in...i fyou have ANY ideas, please l;et us know!

(hug rlawson)

(Meg, we still are teenagers, even if we aren't still in high school!  Don't
give up your youth yet)

Many of the younger Grexers seem to hang out in party, rather than the
conferences.  Maybe we need to figure out how to steer them here.  Hmm,
conference marketing?

I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW AOUT THIS CF
i spend a lot of time in party
but don't tell me i am just a stupid person who is
unaware of the cf's. i am active in the poetry
and writing cf and i wish i'd known about this
you want the teenagers t come back in here
i'll get them :} i'm real good at recruitment

as for the original issue:

i will be 15 in 1 month and 1 day
that makes me fully qualified to respond
HELL YA i know what you mean
but i don't just know about it from personal experience

i have learned a good deal of psycology about it from oh....visting
shrinks and such.
you have problems common to two groups of people who tend to overlap:
the talented and the gifted
i know you are talented and i think from talking to yoy that you are
gifted as well. you therefore feel differend from your peers.
you are an artistic, of the literary sort,
and you see the world differently. maybe you are not well liked by
your peers. i have learne dyou just have to smile at them and understand
they are not as mature as you and they are unlucky they are not
talented the wya you ar with your words treasure you art and share it
but don't rbag and make them feel bad
because that is whta THEY immaturely do with their basketball
and swimming and anything else and you don't want to be like them
sometday they will perhaps appreciate your work and you
or at leasty leanr tlerance
 th adult world treasures it's artists
 the childhood world is diesigned arounda  game of who's who and who is
the most powerful
bt it is all different///late
later...
bear with it
and taslk to artisic people as often as possible

Love,
Jenne

I never felt like I fit in until my junior year of college.  Even now
sometimes I don't feel like I fit in.  But I've come to accept myself for
the person I am, faults and all.
I think I was forced to grow up very quickly.  I was an only child for a 
long time and then BAMN sibling.  Suddenly I had to do everything by
myself.
I was always more cautious too.  It amused me, when I took pre-cal 
during my sophomore year of high school, that I would sit there quietly
before the teacher came in while the seniors would get into watergun
figuhts.  It made me mad that they were allowed to leave campus for lunch
when I wasn't because I felt I was much more mature.
        I never quite fit in as a child either.  I got into my share of
fights but I always felt a bit older.  I guess I justgrew up in a different
way.  And I'm babbling now so I'll go study for my marketing exam now.

babbling is not necessarily a bad thing...:)

I konw but I was tired from studying :) so I wasn't quite coherent.

aren't we all "inbetween?"

inbetween one step and the other...and we will be forever.  :)

Inbetween what?

In between childhood and adulthood. I dunno 'bout you, but I often
feel like a kid. maybe it's just my age, or the age of the people
around me. =)

When I'm here, I feel like an adult.
When I am with my parents, I feel like a kid.
Am I the only one who feels this way?

No, I really think it has everythign to do with context.  When I'm 
with people who see me in a "teaching" role, or as someone  who 
is a senior in college while they are freshmen, sophmeores, etc.
I feel old, but those same people can make me feel young when we
get into conversations about relationships, and hanging out with 
friends in highschool... I feel like they know so mauch more than
me about some things...  And of course, with my parents or my
sister I can be young and silly and not worry about putting up
a "mature" front, so everythign is different.  Though I feel like
I can't talk as easily aobut "mature" issues, like sexuality,
etc. that I feel very strongly about.  Ah censorship!....

Almost everybody I work with is rather significantly older than me, as are
most of the people I find myself hanging out with these days.  Because of that
I find myself really having to act like an adult a lot more than I'd probably
really like to.  I seem to do a pretty good job of fooling people -- every
so often somebody will ask me where I went to college, or something like that,
and seem somewhat shocked to find out that I'm not a college graduate, and
not nearly old enough to be one.

I really find it to be somewhat of a relief to be able to hang out with people
who are about my age, from time to time.

Most of my friends are older than me too... I'm not sure why... but I don't
have any problems at school.  It's when I am at my parents' home that I get
treated  like a little kid by everyone around me.  Apparently the general
consensus in my home town last summer was that I was 13 going on 14 and
finishing the 8th grade  and it was very frustrating.  I hope it doesn't happen
again this summer.  I'm  sure it also has to do with the way I dress though. 
Up at school, where it's  cooler most of the year, I wear jeans, which is
typical college student but at  my parents' home I tendo to wear shorts and
t-shirts and have my hair in a braid or something and that tends to make a big
difference.

Yeah, it does, and no doubt people are so used to treating you as
if you were "13 goin on 14" that they have not stopped to look and see
that you've grown up.  This is not helped, I would imagine, by the
fact that you don't spend the majority of your year around there.
I remember on my 19th birthday we went to a restaurant, and the
waitress said she thought I was turning 13... that made me SO MAD!!
not that I have anything against people who are 13 (my sister, one
of the most wonderful people in the world, is 13, after all) but
it was a gross underestimate of what I percieve to be my maturity.
Though, I am not _super_mature, I am older than that.  Okay, long
story just to say that I sympathize, but if it really bothers you,
you might want to try and do somethign taht would get peopl to
look at you again and see hou you have changed.
anita

Well, I went around wearing a Cornell shirt, a Cornell hat and a Cornell class
ring.  What did they say?  "Oh, do you want to go there?"
*sigh*
If it weren't so hot during the summer, I'd just leave my hair down.  It does
help a lot.  But it's so hard to have it flying loose when you're out shooting
hoops or biking.
People keep telling me someday I'll appreciate looking younger than I am. 
I know I will someday.  But not today!
What can I say?  It runs in the family...

Hey my sister still insists that I'm 13... She just won't accept the
fact that I'm 21. <grin>  I was 13 when she went away to college, so
I must still be that age now... <sigh>

I remember how old *my* younger sister is... even though I'm at college.  But
none of my friends remember.  When I talk about her, they're like, "oh she's
only in the third grade" and I'm like, "NO.  She's in middle school now." 
But I also know that my sister and I are pretty close when it comes to
siblings; I think it's because there's only two of us so we have to join
forces and gang up on our parents :)

Yeah, I'm really tight with my sister, too, and she's in middle 
school too, _and_ I know all about that whole 'you'll appreciate it when
you're older" line... Yeah, but I think that I wante to be my age right now,
and not later....
Sorry if this looks funny, someone's trying to "talk"
me right now...
And I remember my sister's birthday _and_ her age
better than anyone else's (I've been known to slip  on 
my own age!
anita

I always remember my age =) my father forgets from time to time though...

but really, "age is just a number", it's like when you pass january first,
it's kind of hard to remember the year for a while... well, at least I'm
like that about my age...

i'm usually really picky about my age.....lately i've been harassing marc that
i'm not 19, i'm 20, since it'sso close. 

When's your birthday, Meg?

soon.  just leave it at that.   :)

*How* soon?  (mine isn't that far away either)

darn. I forgot. she just had it, too.

Was response 27 just a coincedence?

well, i'm back again......i've not hd time or enough access to worry about
cf's, but i'm fixed now.  :)

Okay - I confess: I'm not a teenager.  I don't think Grex existed back then,
not that I would have known about it.

I do remember feeling that nobody would give me credit for what I was capable
of while I was a teenager though, and feeling that I was very different from
everyone else.  Age is just a number, but unfortunately many people put way
too much emphasis on that.  Teenagers also tend to get typecasted.  Society
tends to think they're all the juvenile delinquents you hear about on the news.
In reality, teenagers, in some sense, aren't very different from adults, in
that there are good ones and bad ones, but it's the bad ones that get all the
press.  So what happens when you're one of the good ones?  People still don't
give you the benefit of the doubt.  Even those who went through the same thing
"forget" or think "it was different in my day"  I'm not sure if it is any
different.  I try to look at people for who they are, not their age.  I can't
guarantee constant success, but I do the best I can.

You don't have to be a teenager to enjoy us....:)

I do remember what teens were like...I think that's why I'm usually so down
about them these days.  (sigh)  And I try so very hard not to be since I
know  so many really nice teens...:)

I was one of those naive innocent think the world is full of good teens until
sixteen, when reality hit and I turned bitter, rebelled, and made a mess of
things.  Luckily I straightened out in a couple of years.

I try to be careful around teens, to think about what I'm going to say, think
about how I would have felt to have those words said to me <AHEM> years ago,
before I blurt out something controversial.

(uh, Grex was around when *I* was still a teenager.)  ;)

Sure. Rub it in :-)

(one of the sad things about our society in general is that we're now
focused on the teenager. our magazine covers feature the latest teen
actor/actress/singing sensation. our products are marketed to the 
teenage demographic. even our language is modified to fit the whims 
of an ever-changing teenage collective.)

(I don't know about the rest of you, but when I was a teenager, I
certainly wasn't ready for all of that societal power. seriously, as
a teenager, I was one of the most important people in America. no one
cares about the old people or the stuffed shirts. society didn't, and
doesn't, see us as the inexperienced, immature punks that we were. no,
we had become *the* thing to be.)

(sometimes I think that the terms "Generation X" and "Generation Y" 
were the harbringers. just like when old people became "senior citizens",
slaves became "African-Americans" and Indians became "Native Americans",
the assignment of a nice [read: politically acceptable] term meant that
we were in for a major screwing. sure enough, mass school shootings 
became the norm. forget the ones you see on the news; I'm thinking of
the gang warfare that permeated California culture through most of the 
80's. did hundreds of kids die just so a young suburban yuppie could
wear baggy jeans and claim to be "'bout it 'bout it"? apparently Vietnam
didn't kill enough of them off, so we have to prepare the next set of
sacrificial lambs. and that means fattening them up, making them think
that someone really gives a flying copulation that they didn't make the
cheerleading squad, or that their parents don't "understand" them.)

(of course, the above non-coherent thoughts are entirely my own.)

(well, the first two paragraphs sounded right on target to me.  I'm still
thinking about the last two, but I expect I'll disagree...)

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