A teenager smells like a vulnerable noob so that you could always locate them, catch the stench of inexperience if you flare your nostrils and breathe in the trail of your prey. Being a teenager looks like one of those campaign videos for an ad or organization where they get “testimonies” and “interviews” from students who participated or used the product and that goofy smile that screams “LOOK AT ME I AM ON CAMERA” and the clumsy enthusiasm they deliver their lines with that is so obviously rehearsed with great pride and bright eyes in front of mirrors a good hundred times.
A teenager smells like vulnerability and looks like breakable bones. I think that we have all come to realize that as the warm embrace of childhood peeled away and we all have to fend off some bitter demons and problems. Especially with the recent demands of Junior College, my revelations about coping with stress has changed and it is no longer just about what we can do (you know the drill: listen to music, talk to friends, exercise etc) but rather how I can approach it.
Firstly, knowing that everybody deals with stress regardless of their situation, I’m starting to think that stress tolerance, as in an innate ability to regulate stress, should be considered a talent, possibly something that can decide how successful we are (by success I mean the minimal emotional trade-offs and maximum enjoyment in addition to what we achieve on the material level). The higher we go (which many of us aspire to do and many of the people in my immediate environment inevitably will do), the more stress we are laden with because it means additional responsibilities for the people who chose us/lead by us/replaced by us. It is a fair trade-off because there is just no way a more reputable or higher-paying job can be easy. I think that to be able to cope with everything requires a trained capacity to regulate the amount of stress we are faced with. Stress is another one of those conditions in the laws of the jungle. As brutal as that is, I am pretty sure that there exists a way to cope with it because evolution always helps us better adapt to the game of survival of the fittest and I think that we have been in a pressure cooker long enough for the evolutionary mechanisms to kick in. I, an optimist, feel that JC is going to be the place we learn to do that.
Secondly, why we perceive that the “jump” between secondary school and JC exists and why we struggle to keep up with the stress and rigor of the new environment is because we need to re-wire our reward system. What I mean is that the cycle we think we deserve to slack-off and reward ourselves needs to gradually become longer because what we deal with are (as parallel in real world) usually happening simultaneously. There can no longer be a mindset of “I finished an exhausting presentation hence I will allow myself to slack off for two days” because in those two days there is an entire list of queued items due. We have to learn to hold off on the rewards because our motivation is no longer just our immediate goal, things are motivated by a deadline, a necessity. Think of those cooking games or hotel management games: the higher level you go the more queued actions you have to plan ahead because only then will you be speedy in doing your duties and meeting your customer’s patience meter (or something), only at the end of each working day do we get a break. I started to understand this when I had multiple important deadlines back to back with no way to compromise and prioritize because of the variety roles I have to fulfill simultaneously (a history, china studies and project work student, an academics ic, a competing cca member…). That does not mean that I am any better at doing what I say though, but hopefully everything can come into fruition really soon because I need it to.
Lastly, JC really has taught me something thus far and that is the value behind the homework/other burdens of our commitments. Many people start to repel the demands of academics and start to adopt a “heckare” attitude because “what is the point of learning how to differentiate/complete an essay in 40 min?” Set aside the teen angst and we have an argument that sounds familiar by now: our education system is flawed because it does not equip us with what we need to meet the real world. I am starting to realize that the argument is partly flawed (not to say that there is no redundant bits to our curriculum) because the act of completing homework and meeting the demands is not so much to ensure that we get our good grades. It has to do with our ability to cope with stress. Homework is just a simulation of all the trials that will come up in our lives that happens to take on a form other than a pile of paper. I feel that what we are really trying to learn from school is how to cope with things that do not go our way because (in my mind at least) educational philosophy has never assigned students homework because it is easy and what we like to do, but rather because we will at times hate it but still need to deal with it. The attitude we choose to adopt in the face of the stress and academics probably will fix the attitude we treat life later on as a jaded adult: are we going to end up as crappy stressed-out cynic, or do we become wiser and smarter the more we see?
Well this ended up being a whole essay about stress, but I think it documents “the growth spurt of the mind” as Mr Burge the wise soul said. I hope that we manage to value our teenage fragility and hopefully learn some lessons from it 🙂
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