Tell me about 14-year-old you

My Grandad died of lung cancer - I can't remember if I went to the funeral or not. I spend most of the time on the Amiga playing games and dealing with unbearable teen angst. I've been questioning the whole point of existence for about a year now - I still kinda believe in God and reckon the Devil is out to get me sometimes. Existential panics and depressive stints aside I get up at 5.30 every morning to do this stupid paper round and get £13 a week - soon I will do two and get a whopping £20 which i spend on blank cassettes to record the Radio 1 Essential Selection mainly - Pete Tong played this great hardcore track that samples The Young Ones last week. my favourite tune at the moment is probably Kicks Like A Mule's 'The Bouncer' - i wish i was old enough to go to raves.

Still go to my Dad's every Sunday - none of us really make much effort and just watch the football on TV or something. I wish things were very different.

I think I have the worst acne ever and loads of people call me names - I keep trying not to get into fights with people during breaktime cos the last time that happened I realised I was actually useless and nearly had an asthma attack. don't like taking shit from these bastards tho. i can't wait to get out of here really, i dream about running away to the beach, which one i'm not sure - and if i can persuade K*lly C*****r to come with then bonus - not very likely tho is it? i had my chance and blew it - unless it was a wind up all along, which is possible...

I live in Southern California for the first part of the year. The stpry follows the story posted on the "10" thread, but things reach their logical conclusion. With my dad not paying child support and my mom working 2 jobs, we still don't have money for food and rent. I have been mom to my now 7-year old brother since he was 3, feeding him, changing him, doing his laundry, now making his lunch and trying to teach him how not to be a brat. That doesn't work very well because he has dyslexia, is hyperactive, and has learning disabilities. Of course it is 1978 so not a lot is publicized about this, and we are poor and my mom is not educated so he doesn't get any help.

I love KISS, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and punk hasn't quite hit the US yet, at least not in the suburbs. It will take one more year before I get into it. For now I am a huge Star Wars fan, and have seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind and love all things sci-fi.

For this school year (8th grade), I have exactly two pairs of pants and I wear them all year. We really can't afford any. The welfare office tells my mom she makes too much money to qualify for services. Seeing that the only way we can eat is because people from the church bring boxes of food, this strikes me as insane. I wait in the hot car while she pleads with them, and comes out angry and hopeless.

She can't make the payment on the mobile home anymore. The sales agreement says if she sells it, she has to sell it back to the park owner she bought it from, so she gets a less than fair price.

A Mexican friend of hers lets the three of us move into a bedroom of their house in Costa Mesa while my mom figures out what to do. Remember this is a time of record inflation, high prices, high interest rates, and joblessness in the US. She is laid off from her job in the electronics factory.

Sitting in the room in July, mom has the "talk" with me. She says she can't support us, and that she will have to give us up to the State, put us in foster care. She says I might be separated from my little brother. I don't remember any of the conversation after that, but the next thing I know I am on a plane to my grandparents house in North Carolina, alone with my brother. Mom has stayed behind to see if she can get a job, get back on her feet, and then send for us.

My little brother is sick with a cold, and I give him his medicine on the plane. I pray he doesn't have one of his fever/asthma episodes before we make the 6 hour flight. My first-ever period starts, on Delta Airlines, somewhere over Arkansas.

The plane touches down, after an eternity in Wilmington, N.C. I have to take my grandmother aside and tell her the situation, not an easy thing. We stop at Paul's Place, a rural combination hot dog stand and grocery store to buy pads.

I start school (9th grade) in August. The school bus come through the fog from where it starts on the "wring" side of the tracks. I am the first white kid on the bus, and it comes at 5:15am. It winds over miles and miles of rural area, stopping in front of papered shacks with wells out front, outhouses, and wood stoves for heat; it bumps down unpaved white chalk roads in the fog; sometimes the soft earth gives way and the bus slides into the ditch. We wait hours for another bus to come get us while somehow the bus is righted. On those days, and when we get stuck in the fog near the river and have to stop, we don't get to school until about noon. I am one of three white kids on the bus.

I am one of about 30 white kids in a 90% black public school. They put all the white kids in the same classroom. I get to know the black kids on the bus and on the volleyball team that I play on. Because the kids come from miles around, it is very isolating. My classes are held in a trailer, with a leaking roof and a hole in the floor in the back corner. It stays like that the whole year.

The house is old and unheated except for an oil burning stove from 1930 in the front room. We have our own well, and have to light a heatlamp in the pumphouse and leave the faucets dripping in the winter so the pipes don't freeze and burst. A tornado bounces over our house in a storm while I have a fever. I stay home sick, listening to Alice Cooper. Across the street prisoners are in a chain gang digging a ditch. I turn the music up.

I am a 14 year old girl, dying on the vine, on a rural highway in the middle of nowhere.

i think i maybe had a breakdown.

I feel like I have to end this on a positive note, and the summer I was 14 now strikes me as a genuinely happy time.

Madchen, you just made me spit out my coffee on my keyboard.

1984/5: I stopped playing football for Stevenage Colts. I stopped reading 'Roy of the Rovers' and '2000AD' and started reading 'Smash Hits' and the 'NME'. I became a vegetarian. I was doing very well academically but didn't have any friends outside of school. I watched a lot of telly. I bought 'Hatful of Hollow' on my birthday, entered the reclusive dark back bedroom of my teenage years and didn't come out again until 1989.

I wasn't that cool, but I was far from a geek. My friends and I got drunk for dances that year, which made us "badasses" of sorts, considering we were only "Grade 9ers". Our dances were organised by the ginos, which was good because they had wicked DJ/PA/Lighting equipment - the end result being our dances were the hot event for Scarborough teens. I listened to a LOT of Depeche Mode, Def Leppard and Duran Duran, and random dance music. My biggest event was going to see Duran Duran at Maple Leaf Gardens (March 5, 1984 - my first ever concert). They filmed the video for "The Reflex" video that night and holy trinity was I excited about that. I also liked a lot of electro-funk at the time, and I was really starting to get into "different" music, thanks to an abnormally good radio station called CFNY, which I had just started to listen to. I got in big trouble one night when I went "downtown" to an all-ages dance club called "Club Z". A friend's older brother drove us down. I thought it was amazing. They played Trans-X's "Living On Video", Blancmange, Depeche Mode and other stuff of that sort, which made me very happy. I got home very late and was grounded for a few weeks. I got on OK with my parents, though. I was a good kid (no brothers or sisters), and they were good to me.

I was a late bloomer in the girls department, but I did have a couple crushes, which went no-where. I was a bit shy, and to be honest, my school didn't have too many cute girls anyway. The biggest excitement I got was slow-dancing at the dances, and during a summer trip to England, I made out regularly with the daughter of a family friend (she was 12), and we became a long-distance "couple" of sorts for a few months. We wrote each other many romantic letters. Yes, that's right - LETTERS, put into the post. I can hardly fathom what that world was like right now... Oddly, I'm visiting this same girl in Oxford next month.

Life was OK, but it had frustrations. I liked going on band trips and doing stupid things on the weekends with my friends. It was the starting point of a lot of things for me, and a strange year.

I also become friends with Steven and Kevin. Kevin is a really intelligent sort of messer, he constantly makes weird contraptions for firing elastic bands at people, or squeezes bits of tinfoil for hours in the vice in the art room so they're harder when he throws them. Steven is also into music, probably the tallest guy in the class but not really a jock. I remember not liking him for some silly reason the year before, but he would become one of my oldest friends, and the one who got into rave and other important things with me.

I am smart at school, in English especially, the teacher is also our form teacher, he's a nice guy. I remember him trying to inform us about drugs, at the time I remember thinking hash must be commonplace but everything else was for social dropouts. It was fairly iffy information.

I hate science and am crap at it, but the teacher respects me a bit after I ask a question about whether there was a heat equivalent of Kelvin, he is a bit like Fr Jack from Father Ted and he says "you might be crap at science but a question like that shows your ability to question things is no joke". He gives me a great report at the parent teacher meeting even though I get Ds all the time.

I take part in a play, "Treasure Island" and I am Dr Livesey. Everyone says I do really well and it's really good fun, there are no girls in it though which disappoints everyone. My parents are extremely proud. I refuse to do any lines afterwards at any stage for some reason.

God so much is coming back to me, I guess it's only 7 years ago. My dad has his 50th birthday, a big party in the house. I come back in from the play and his friend Dermott, who is kind of a hard boiled egg, sees makeup on my face and says "you'd better sort that out Brendan", joking I guess. There is alot of cigar smoke.

My brother has moved to London for about a year at this stage, I miss having him around. He always has new cds and things for me. My other brother I row with more, he is 3 years ahead of me in school. My sister I don't see all that often, but we get along ok.

My friends outside school are Paul, Dave, John, Alan, and Rowan. At this time we don't get along very well, my parents are strict enough and I'm not always allowed out to discos and things. This drives me mad and alienates me a bit from the local friends. There's some mild bullying, very mild really cos I stop going out to the park etc. I think at the time I'll stop hanging around locally and we'll stop being friends, but it transpires eventually it was just kind of adolescence. Paul, the one who seemed to pick on me a bit more then becomes one of my best friends, we all get along again circa 15.

I guess it was a matter if accepting each others differences and things.

Life was pretty good I guess. It got alot better as I got older.

I've got a Sassoon bob and I dress like an old lady: Katharine Hepburn. I'm getting a David Bowie fetish because of finding the LP for Brecht's Baal, and transferring crushes from Peter O'Toole who had been in same. My tastes are very camp: I like Queen, Abba, Human League, Adam Ant, Blondie, Soft Cell. Somehow I have the Eurythmics album that came out before Sweet Dreams, and I'm not mad keen on Grace Jones. Prince is not yet a factor in my age group, but Michael Jackson is still milking fucking Thriller. I'm starting to pick up black clothes here and there but the market isn't really there for that yet.

I write really strange books, one after the other, and have a reputation as a prodigy although reading them now merely conveys how much I was watching black and white battle-of-the-sexes comedies as a substitute for a social life.

After being pilloried all through junior high, I've managed to leave that behind early in 9th grade. My friends come from the ranks of gifted kids, theatre junkies, tamed art department stoners and crucially, the punk rock girls one and two years older than me who befriended me at a theatre-kid's wrap party and by coincidence cannot abide most of the girls who used to hate on me, on intellectual grounds. We go to Rocky Horror and vintage clothes stores. I'm sneaking downtown without my mother knowing, and it's great.

I get straight As and the drama/literature/media teacher calls me Dorothy Parker. I start to read her and understand what he might be on about. People who hassled me got a right mouthful. I'd spent all of 8th grade playing dumb to escape attention, but this year counted towards college and getting the fuck out of here, so I snapped out of that pretty quickly.

Traces of the bullying remain, but the culprits are boys (it helps that half of the girl bullies have become pregnant and left school, but I always knew that would happen). It stops when one of the theatre proto-goths reveals that Squeaky Fromme is her cousin, so we scribble 'Helter Skelter! Squeaky says DIE!' on one boy's locker in bright red lipstick. He changes lockers and never says a word to any of us ever again.

I'm still friendly with my best friend from elementary school, but she's a smoking-section rebel and her friends are the fast girls our age from Edina. They invite me to go to Perkins and smoke with them and try to get me off with these doofy, nothing, peach-fuzz boys, but I don't take to it. I've got the flattest chest of anyone I know and I can't bear talking about tits all day with the girls en masse. So instead Sandi and I hang out intermittently and listen to Donna Summer and AC/DC, or just sit reading smutty books all afternoon. We both start with the whole youth employment thing, me at the soda fountain and her at a dry-cleaners.

My parents finally divorced at the beginning of this year. Six months later, my dad remarried - me and my sister were not invited to the wedding. Money has gotten very tight this year, all of a sudden: my mum is ill with a reccurring back problem and is perennially one paycheque short of a sort-out. The mortgage company have been dicking her around, returning cheques to her rather than crediting her account. We think the bank is trying to serve foreclosure so we do not answer the door.

I escape to my friend Nellie's house, where her old English dad the mad scientist presides over a house of cats and books and conversations with big words. We drink tea and eat cake at four sharp every day after school. I think Nellie knows what's going on at home and has sympathy, even though despite appearances her family is probably the richest in the area (her dad won millions in a lawsuit but isn't allowed to say how many, but the original award is in the Guinness Book of World Records). She's in the grade below and has just moved here from a ramshackle part of south Minneapolis, and is mad about Deborah Harry. Her dad gives running commentary on Brideshead Revisited because he was at Cambridge between the wars. We just sit there like five-year-olds at story hour.

It beats staying home and fighting with my mom and sister.

14-15 as far as i recall was a pretty shitty time to be alive.

this was the first video I ever saw on mtv!

Nearly all my friends from my old school have come to this one with me, but most of them will not stay my friends. I become shy even though I wasn't before, and am not popular. I do make a few new friends, mainly Clare J. My best friends, Georgie and Simon, leave the school after a few weeks and are tutored at home for the rest of the year. I miss them but vow I will not leave however hard it is. Georgie's mum tells me I am 'weak-willed' and I never really forgive her. I am taking GCSE options in French, History, Drama and Classics. I like all these subjects and do very well, but hate my French teacher and her blue eyeshadow. Drama can be bad because Clare A is in my group and she is a vicious, nasty bully.

I am jealous of a group who are involved in drama and the debating society - I think they are my natural friends but I seem to have left it too late to get in the gang. I have crushes on three boys, so does my friend Clare. We talk about them endlessly and have complex codes referring to almost everyone in our year. I am not happy. It's been a year since my parents divorced; my dad has moved away and I don't enjoy my weekends there at all. There's nothing to do and I don't know anyone. Dad isn't happy either. Mum's boyfriend moves in with us; I like him ok and want a quiet life but my sister is a different matter.

Musically, I like REM, The Levellers and Queen. This doesn't help me make friends either.

*ahem* So, 14-year-old me. That would be the very end of 1993 - the very end of 1994. Ok. The first half of it was consumed by me trying my very hardest to make it through what I had come to recognize as a major social nightmare, i.e. grade school. I have been back with many of the same individuals I went to school with as a very young child for a total of four years, and I've finally come to recognize that they, as well as every other person I've gone to school with, have either fooled me into thinking they like me or have managed to make me forget all the blatant signs they were sending that they didn't want to have anything to do with me. (Well, all but one person, but that one person is about 1,000 miles away and probably doesn't remember me.) School is still academically a success, though, to my consternation.

Then came high school. Nerve-wracking to the core. I had to choose which high school I wanted to go to, take the high school placement exam, and basically swear my allegiance to one high school shortly before my 14th birthday. I decided on a high school with a more diverse enrollment than any of the other ones I'd toured, bypassing the high school my grade school principal wanted me to go to (tough titties, Sister). On the first day of high school, I instantly feel as though I made the wrong decision. So many groups of individuals already formed, so many different types of people than the ones I'd been accustomed to dealing with, so many ways to be intimidated. I retreat into myself. I don't want to make myself look like a fool. This instantly marks me as a target for the girls who already have boyfriends in gangs, or for the girls who are in gangs, but also enables me to find my niche as a "quiet girl" and actually make friends with other "quiet girls". (A couple of years later on, I will find myself fitting into a number of slots -- a "smart girl"/"joiner"/"uncategorizable".) A year later, I will almost withdraw from the high school because of the troubles I was receiving from some rather cruel people. Once again, I find myself succeeding academically, though, and thankfully I have been predirected toward the honors track, so most of my classmates are fellow "smart girls" whom I can relate with at least on that level.

Duran Duran has already long since entered the fray, and I rely upon their music as a major source of inspiration, counseling, and oh yes, entertainment. I am ecstatic that they've become popular (again) and that I can see their videos on MTV. I also listen to Ultravox, Japan, Tears For Fears, David Bowie, Human League, ABC, Depeche Mode, The Cure, Corey Hart, The Police, Talk Talk, a-ha, Bananarama, Madness, The Go-Go's, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, and a number of other musical artists I will find myself continuing to listen to ten years from then. I am wild about the '80s and find myself highly disappointed that "Classic MTV" slowly fades off the TV radar. VH1 is in the midst of its gigantic channel makeover, though, so I can at least watch that a bit more than I used to. Music videos are my biggest source of entertainment and when I'm not at school or in a club meeting or doing homework or at the nursing home or taking showers or sleeping, I'm watching music videos.

Music videos take me away to a world unlike the one I'm living in. Dad is no longer seen as this invincible figure -- not when it's been three years since his cancer diagnosis and 1 1/2 years since he went into remission. He was doing fairly poorly then -- almost died. But then my grandfather passed on instead and I mourned that. My grandmother's Alzheimer's surfaced shortly after my grandfather's passing and we end up having to take care of her. I suspect that part of the motivation behind my wanting to start working at a nursing home is because I sensed in the back of my mind that that's where we'd end up having to put her, as a last resort. By the end of my 14th year, this suspicion becomes reality.

Oh God, there are so many more things I could say about 14-year-old me. I could say of the times I nearly fainted because I was bleeding too much (TMI territory, I'm aware), or of the summer trip we took back to the Bay Area and of fond rememberances, or of my mom's compulsion for order order order, or of the first time I seriously considered taking my own life, or of insecurities, uncomfortable times, or other things, but I don't have the time to right now. Hm. Will have to complete this in my journal.

I had also just discovered the joy of buying records in April '83, so most of my free time at weekends was spent journeying to Cardiff with my friends picking up whatever records I was into at the time. It was all OMD, Kraftwerk, Freur, stuff like that to begin with, then I discovered Peel in the autumn and started buying Factory stuff, then Eno albums too. Discovering Kellys Records in Cardiff market was a good step forward too.

Girls figures highly in my life, not only Debbie but also a few others, my fickle self picked Rachel T to have another crush on about two weeks after Debbie's disappearance, and that one lasted for about two years. Obviously still in school, doing quite well at pretty much everything at the time - hadn't discovered my depressing nature yet which would foul my education for most of my late teens and early 20s. In early '83 an English teacher asked us all to start a diary, mine didn't stop until 1996, and reading it for '83 to '84 is a laugh, as I just come across as an immature fool who is obsesses with girls and music and hanging out with his mates. And really, that sums up me at 14.

OK, I'm 14, I'm thin as a rake, got thick glasses and well dodgy hair. Girls don't look once at me, let alone twice. Doesn't stop me looking at them. School work may be fine, but I'm being bullied mercilessly by some other kids, which amazingly stops once I punch one of them during a physics lesson in Jan '84. Admittedly I get caught and thrown out of the class, but it was worth it. Autumn and winter '83 seem to be very dark days, Debbie perming her hair, bullying all the time, constant rain, and friends talking about this new band called the Smiths. Listening to Radio Luxembourg almost constantly, or CBC (local radio), dedicating songs to girls I'm in love with and seeing if anyone else notices the next day. Trying to avoid my brother who's playing tuneless guitar to Mick Ronson albums. I get my first instrument - Casio MT45 - for Xmas '83, and start writing little tunes on it quite happily. It's cheesy as hell, but I don't care, it's an instrument and I can write stuff on it. Actual songs won't come until summer '84 though.

Summer '83 was good though. A school exchange trip to Germany was a good laugh, eating lots of chocolate and playing Atari games. Lots of sunshine, lots of cool records, one of the best summers, shame it ended so badly with autumn. So that was basically me at 14, bullied, obsessed, and just discovering my brother's stash of porn under his bed.

I wish. I watched that video a thousand times trying to spot myself to no avail. I was in the "greys" at Maple Leaf Gardens and the seats were shitty. The thing I remember most about the show was the video screen. The big game everyone played that night was to scream wildly whenever their "favourite" member was on the screen. Simon got most of the screams, but the posse I was with were screamin' for Nick Rhodes all the way.

Awww, shucks... I'm not worthy! Really. No joke. Did you miss the bit where I mentioned Def Leppard?

I'm a drama geek, and I land the role of Helen Keller in the winter production of The Miracle Worker. This involves grunting and moaning while crawling around with kneepads on under bloomers. I have no idea how ridiculous I look. I split my head open during a dress rehearsal in front of the junior high kids during a fight scene and blood drips into my eyes. Pretty cool. At the end of the year, I get the best actress award and all of the senior girls are mad at me.

I have an enormous crush on a burnout named Chris, and steal enrollment lists from a teacher to figure out which classes I share with him. Maybe this part was when I was 15 actually. We go on a drama field trip and I innocently fall asleep on his shoulder on the way back. We go out for a week. He's a great kisser. I see my first cocaine in the back of his friend's Trans Am.

I join every academic club there is so as to take advantage of the field trips and try to entertain myself. This pays off big time the summer after 9th grade, when I go to the International Thespian Society's Conference in Ball State, Indiana. I go from being the black-clad drama freak to being totally outclassed by the representations of the breed at this week-long conference.

I see ACTUAL BOYS IN REAL LIFE WHO WEAR EYELINER. I dance the Time Warp for the first time and become obsessed with Rocky Horror and crossdressing. I sing "I Melt With You" along with a guitar player on a grassy quad. I hijack a sound system with a group and we set up our own dance floor in an empty room and play the Lighning Seeds and KMFDM and Depeche Mode until someone figures us out. I feel like someone understands me for the first time.

For my 15th birthday, my mom takes me and my friends to the nearest movie theatre (2 hrs drive) to sneak into Pump Up The Volume and the rest of my life is pretty much set.

We find ourselves in a fairly affluent middle-class North London suburb. I am an incredibly surly and kind of overweight boy, enjoying the freedom of my newly-longish hair, though I haven't yet got the idea that you're meant to wear it kinda greasy (to be REALLY cool), so I continuously get remarks from girls to the effect that my hair has so much body and questions over which conditioner I use. Which is cool, because girls are good.

I am the very definition of sarcastic. In fact, I do not think I will speak a word in sincerity for a good 3/4 years. I now attend a prestigious and clubby private boys school in Hampstead. The vast majority of my classmates are from well-off families and will grow up to be politicians, lawyers, brokers, and accountants.

Although I was top of every class in my former school, I am struggling academically here. Not only do I feel out of my depth, but I don't really care. I have a big group of friends now, friends who hate the school as much as I do, and most crucially, have access to drugs and women, chiefly the young women that attend our sister school only a stone's throw further down the Finchley Road. It seems as though there is a party every weekend. We drink cider and red wine, get stoned, and listen to many of the American grunge/art-rock/lo-fi favorites of the day, - Nirvana, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr, Sebadoh, as well as a few British acts like The Prodigy (for dancin') and The Orb (for smokin').

Sadly, I do not have a great deal of success with the girls of S**** H*******, and habitually lust after M*****A K*******S, who I will eventually have a very brief encounter with, albeit while she is "seeing" one of my best friends. To compensate for my romantic and academic failures, I begin self-medicating with the zeal of a new convert. I try acid and love it, and many of my friends are moving on to harder drugs like speed and on occasion, cocaine.

My parents begin to express concern that they have no idea where I am at any given time (and with whom). As the most sarcastic teenager on earth, I have no interest in telling them the truth, and feel happy to feed them nonsense replies along the lines of "I'm joining the circus". They would prefer me to perhaps join a Jewish society at school or in my spare time, perhaps meet a girl from a nice family. They are rather hurt that the large sums that they are spending on my education appear to be in vain.

Asides from partying like a fool, I start to develop an interest in film and travel. Reservoir Dogs has just been released, Wild At Heart was blowing me away, and I begin to watch the work of US indie directors like Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, and Hal Hartley, whose films I do not always understand but seem to speak to me through their tone and visual language. My family does a great deal of travelling around the United States, and I particularly enjoy our visits to San Francisco, a city I adore and hope to live in one day in the future. On one trip, my friend James and his family are staying down in Fisherman's Wharf. We meet up and head over to the Haight to buy weed and acid. The acid doesn't work, but we walk around the city well into the evening discussing our plans for the future. James wants to be an artist and start a huge art collective for painters, filmmaker, and sculptors. He is very ambitious and excitable. In four years, he will commit suicide by jumping off of a bridge.

Excited and freaked out ALL THE TIME, surprised how suddenly I'm not a geek who plays sports but rather a freshman athlete (quarterback, center, letter-winner in track) who happens to read Dos Passos and Gormenghast on team bus trips, get beat up but not by the guys who've been trying to beat me up all summer. Trying not to notice that my father is drinking all the time and picking fights with my mother. Befriending new soph girl from Cali in biology class with bad kidney who bursts into tears when John Lennon is shot, she disappears for a month or two, reappears, she tells me about her abortion, suddenly my whole world view has changed, never to return.

I like heavy metal and so do my friends. We like Metallica, Judas Priest (though if we knew about Halford we probably wouldn't have), Quiet Riot, Ratt, Def Leppard and the rest. We watch headbanger's ball all of the time. My older brother and I try to be in a band that plays Motley Crue songs, he plays guitar and I play drums. In the summer, we ride bikes around our suburban neighborhood. I break my arm skateboarding in an empty pool because I suck at it, but so does everyone else.

My dad has begun to go a little crazy. He comes home drunk from time to time, but we like it as he doesn't hit anyone then. When he gets really angry, he'll throw everyone around the house, but my older brother gets it the worst. My mom tries to get help but no-one wants to get involved as my dad is respected in the community and a church elder. The pastor tells her to ask God for help. I learn that people who go to church are hypocritical fucking scumbags. My brother runs away to Florida after some particularly savage beatings. My mom takes me and my younger brother one day in the summer and we drive down there too, and stay with my uncle and aunt for a while. Finally we all come back as my dad has agreed to certain conditions.

Thank god we are moving out of this shitty town. We move close to Detroit, and it is a new school. I am much happier here. I start skateboarding a lot, and have a new group of friends from my neighborhood. More girls like me here. I start to get over my intense shyness, and I like heavier music now like Megadeath and Slayer. I also like Guns and Roses. Here, I am one of the top students and I don't even have to do anything! It's great. I get drunk with my friends and we try to skate home falling down and laughing. Life is getting better.

The transfer was because I had been stagnating for years academically - this goes back to being the youngest kid in the junior school, but still top of the class by a stretch, so they bumped me ahead, then wouldn't let me take the 11-plus exam at 9, so held me backa again. So in early '73 I'm completely uninterested and somewhere in the middle of the top stream (like 10 kids) at the local comp, and my parents decide to send me to a better school. I make an effort in my last term at the comp and come top in five subjects, and more or less carry that into the new school, where standards are much higher and I have to learn Latin. I get on okay with others there, but feel out of place in many ways among all these rich kids. It must have been around this time that, a puny sick kid (very badly asthmatic, with very inadequate treatment at this time, laid up in the sick bay pretty regularly), I get sick of being pushed around by an arsehole bully a year older, four inches taller and a couple of stone heavier, and fight back, and somehow get the best of it. I play a lot of football and am fairly good, despite the asthma, but the main school sports are rugby, hockey and cricket, none of which I have played before, and I'm one of the worst at all of them. I'm getting keen on table tennis, but I'm not very good at it yet.

I don't think I had had what you could reasonably call a girlfriend at this time, and had only kissed a few girls. I think I felt pretty lonely. I had become keen on masturbation (how many 14 year old boys weren't?).

Actually, other than the better treatment of my asthma and the muscle that has come from somewhere, not that much has changed. I found a diary of mine a few years back that I think covered early 1974, and it was all books and music and football.

I am three years into a hopeless crush on a guy in my year which will last until I am seventeen without ever being requited. He hates me and is beaten up just because I fancy him. This is not really fair, but it's what 14 year olds do. I cry a lot, write a diary which is a lot of whiney self-indulgent bollocks, and listen to the Jesus and Mary Chain and lots of goth shit. I am told that a guy two years below me fancies me. I don't believe it, but am horrible to him whenever possible as I keep thinking this will make me a bit cooler. I feel shit when he dies of meningitis.

I can't remember much else about being 14.

I like trad. irish music way too much, I'm making spending money reproducing celtic knotwork drawings for the queensland irish association giftshop in the city, very unfulfilling. Uh...I have no friends (no surprises there), my sense of dress is best described as "middle-aged" (no change). I'm still innocent, still trying to please my deranged mother, still going to church, still doing well in school :)

hormones, hormones, hor-MONES!
hormones, hormones, hor-MONES!
hormones, hormones, hor-MONES!
hormones, hormones, hor-MONES!

[[repeeat ad nauseam]]

2) since I didn't--this is grade nine. My hair is parted in the middle like a soccer player. I'm one of the better athletes in my grade, but too geeky for that to count. I've just gotten contact lenses, which is awesome. The space shuttle blows up. I've just started playing basketball; I'm fairly athletic but can't shoot for squat.

Up until now, I have pretty much gotten straight A's--but now I no longer seem to care. I'll get good grades, but I'm not really interested in learning at school. It would be easy to explain this change by blaming puberty, but I think it's more fundamental--somehow, I no longer buy into the system. I don't rebel against it, but I slide through with the minimum necessary and still ultimately end up 3rd in my class.

I am thoroughly pissed and want to fight the people who say "Oh, these are the best times of your life!" And then in the darkness I pray that they're wrong.

I cut myself that year too. Only once. I think I'm horribly ugly and fat. I was tracing my wrists with one of the kitchen knives, hoping to just nick the veins to see how much they might bleed. Not to kill myself but to plan for it, have an idea of...something. The knives are too dull to break the skin. So I get the butcher knife, grab a bit of my midsection, and just slice. A small, deep incision inspired by self-loathing and a curiosity about whether I can even feel. It bleeds a lot, and takes a long time to heal.

One night I get a call. My friend Emily has found my notebook with all the suicidal writings, she's freaked out and clearly doesn't know how to act, having read what I'd written. She'd found it in the little compartment next to the desk I sat in for history class. She uses the same desk in that room, two class periods after mine. Someone else must have read it, she says. When she gets it back to me the next day, there are little comments here and there, approval of a doodling or a band I've quoted. And there's a message negating some of my self-criticisms--"I'm a sophomore boy who knows you. You're not ugly, far from it. You're smart. You have a lot going for you. It's worth it to live". Something like that.

I wonder who he is. I skip classes and find that there's a sophomore class between my class and Emily's, and sitting in that desk is Matt Means. I have a class with him first period. Some acquaintanceish friends of mine are friends with him. He's always seemed like a good guy, but he's too cool, and a year older than me. I never knew him that well.

Somehow, those comments mean a lot to me. I'm still suicidal and it takes a while and a lot of therapy to work through that. The memory of the writings in my notebook lingers with me for a long time. I never talk very much to Matt. Down the road, I end up going to the same university as him, and I am too shy to ever say hi. There's part of me that wants to thank him. I want to tell him how some comments out of nowhere from a mere acquaintance affected me during such a difficult time. But I don't know how.

I wrote this whole thing trying to remember it all and realized how horrible it all was. Here are the beginning and end parts:

I entered high school the first time before classes, realized I had no one to talk to and/or not the balls to try and so I walked around trying to look busy while having a sinking feeling te next four years were going to blow. This was almost everyday in hs until I stopped going, but thats a whole something else.
-deleted even more embarrassing things part-
I was a prozac zombie by winter after being forcebly sent to a therapist because I was constantly feigning sickness and had bad grades even though I always tested well in all those tests. I remember that summer as the most depressing thing ever (so far), just sitting around watching TV by myself all day and thinking about how much I sucked by torturously replaying embarrassing moments of the past year over and over in my head.

Reflecting on it all now I wish I had discovered Dostoevsky and/or Joy Division or something and excepted myself as a loner/nerd/etc instead of fighting it in vain. I'm always jealous of those people who had a horrible time in high school, but had something to believe in or love or listen to and identify with because I never did.

Someone has to start the 16 year old thread at some point too.

I finally snapped at one point early in the second semester, just after my 14th birthday. One of the sows challenged me to a fight after French and just as soon as a crowd gathered and the swings began, both of us were dragged away to the Ass Principal's office for the kind of hearing that starts with 'if anyone interrupts it's two weeks detention'. Luckily I was well-spoken and my opponent wasn't - I didn't get detention because I told Ass Principal that they'd been trying to get me to fight all year, I was sick of it, and creating a GREAT BIG SCENE was the only solution when teachers and administration had been ignoring the problem for months (also my mum would back me up; my grades were falling because I wasn't given a moment's peace in my classes and she was sick of the crank calls at all hours). Making sure I spoke first, I trapped my opponent, saying she had been put up to it by other girls, they were just using her and were not her real friends, so it was down to her to say who they were - which made her the snitch, not me. Whatever happened, if you 'narced', you would not have wanted to show up the next day.

So off we go to the counselor's office and inkblots and MMPIs and all the usual shit gets brought out. I'm pretty fortunate that the trend for kids on meds hadn't started yet otherwise this joker surely would have had me on them.

Luckily, by the time I'd finished being 14 things were a lot better (see above).

At a sprawling Catholic comprehensive on the Wirral; chugged along more than adequately, not really trying, an approach which led to emphatic academic underachievement a little later on when it actually mattered.

Didn't own any pop records, but filled C90 after C90 from the radio - the "Ever So Lonely"-"More Than This"-"I Could Be Happy" sequence from one cassette remains my madeleine.

Early in 4th form, a happy accident of chum-clustering in Thursday afternoon's double geography means latecomer J*n*tt* W**d*ll (New Brighton's answer to Jodie Foster) has no choice but to take the empty seat next to me. I live for periods 6 & 7 on a Thursday for the next three terms. We reconvene in the lockers after Maths and take the bus to the nasty end of town together (her Gran lives in Seacombe). I know her and her snide friends laugh behind my back, but, hey, I make her laugh too. Shame it takes me until 1988 to get over her.

Magically, my acne clears up (and then, at 15, cruelly reappears with a vengeance; by this time JW has fallen in with a crowd of bad-ass grrlz I can't begin to understand - in 5th form geography classes, she's a blonde-fringed vision...twenty feet away), I briefly shed my spoddy nature to become a feared (by other spods) tennis and squash opponent - my all-time sporting triumph happens at 14: thrashing our new, bronzed PE supply teacher 6-2 6-0 in Harrison Park, giggling fifth-form girls gathered on the grassy bank, less impressed by my forehand than by his Fry flick and tanned limbs.

There's quite a socioeconomic spread at St M*ry's and I appear to be at the wrong end of it, though this is never an issue until I'm 16 or so. Then, I'm 'dockscum'. It's an affectionate term.

I'm 14 years old, in the 8th grade, and I have decided that the liberty spikes are no longer worth it. They are too much of a pain in the ass to gel up in the morning, and I've decided they look kind of stupid anyway. At this point in my life, I listen to practically nothing but NOFX, Lagwagon, Rancid, and my one friend's band. I am totally addicted to videogames, recently got a computer and now am totally addicted to the internet. I play Shenmue and Age of Empires every day.

My circle of friends are mostly fellow gamer geeks, but most of them I will never talk to again after 8th grade ends and high school begins (where I will instead follow some other close friends of mine into a considerably larger and considerably less geeky group). I have several dire crushes, I approach not one of them. Every day, I go home and pass out from exhaustion, sleeping until dinner time.