How Adulthood Is Like High School All Over Again
If you've ever struggled to navigate office politics, faced a catty clique at church, or felt left out of a social circle and thought, "This feels like high school," you are not alone.
Since we develop our identities during those formative teenage years, there's a part of us that stays there. A recent New York Magazine piece explained "Why You Never Truly Leave High School." According to the article, even when high school long behind us, it remains at the front of our minds:
The adolescent years occupy a privileged place in our memories, which to some degree is even quantifiable: Give a grown adult a series of random prompts and cues, and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence. This phenomenon even has a name—the "reminiscence bump"—and it's been found over and over in large population samples, with most studies suggesting that memories from the ages of 15 to 25 are most vividly retained.
Vivid might be an understatement. I remember standing with my back to the biting February wind, smoking behind the school with the rest of the misfit kids because the social taxonomy of my high school had me slotted into the genus "freak." The smoking area was the place where the freaks lit up between classes. Jocks and cheerleaders ruled the football field. The library was the home of the brainy kids. Thespians owned the warren of rooms surrounding the school's theater space.
I home-schooled my three children through high school hoping the experience would provide a more inclusive, less socially segregated frame of reference. Even within the more individualistic home school community, fairly typical cliques and alliances formed among many of the teens, even though there was no physical football field, library, or smoking area to mark each group's turf.
Take away the school, the cliques are still there. Turns out, you can even add a few decades, and the cliques still remain. Any time adults are herded into "giant boxes of strangers," the same kind of tribalizing behavior we first experience during our teens usually follows, according to U.C. Davis researcher Robert Faris, cited in the New York Magazine article. We will be dealing with high school dynamics until we draw our final breath.
High-school-for-life includes our experiences in the church. Is there anyone out there who hasn't experienced a case of benign exclusion (or worse, a Mean Girl-style campaign) by an "in-group" at church at one time or another? We Christians don't always do a good job of acknowledging that our lifelong growing pains and insecurities shape our identity. If our adolescent search for self forms the filter through which we interpret social reactions for the rest of our lives, then I suspect there's an important "both/and" tucked inside the "either/or" way in which we usually talk about our "in the world, but not of the world" identity as followers of Christ.
Stay Sexy or Else? Well, Please Forgive These Mommy Hips
Desperate for Their MRS. Degrees
'The Office' Shows Even TV Romance Isn't Picture-Perfect
The Double Shock of Unexpected Pregnancy
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
Pinterest
Comments
audrey ruth
As long as one man (or woman) loves to lord it over another one (as Christ Jesus expressly forbade His disciples to do), there will be cliques, there will be bullies, there will be those who exclude others from their "inner circle". I actually attended a church where the pastor and his wife freely acknowledged the fact that they had an inner circle, and that those who were "without" should work hard to work their way in. WOW. Sadly, I don't know that anyone (especially the elders of the church) ever challenged them on this flagrant contradiction of God's Word. If they had, I suppose they would then have been excluded from that inner circle. God help us.
Deb Tomsky
Loved Breakfast Club when it first came out ~ and so did my kids when they were teens (they're mostly in their 20's now) ~ so it still rings true! I noticed the popular teen/tween show "Victorious" recently did a homage to BC ~ so this next generation is also be blessed with the comfort of knowing that everyone else is really just as insecure as they are :)
Yohanna Puric
Great article! High school was the happiest stage in my life though - carefree, innocent, idealistic, full of adventures, and lots of fun. I was part of a group of five girls interested in reading Mills and Boon, Barbara Cartland, etc. adored Jacky Chan, Muhammad Ali, the Bee Gees, ABBA, country music, Charlie's Angels, Starsky and Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man, Little House on the Prairie, etc. but also interested in country hikes, the Citizens' Army Training and it seems to me now in anything and everything that we were studying. We explored the city we lived in, talked about meeting that 'tall, dark, compelling man'. We wanted to be private detectives, astronauts, in the army. We were mad about basketball and hated school socials. We loved and feared some teachers and sneered at others. I sometimes wish I could have stayed in high school much much longer. Unfortunately, one has to go to college and be an adult.
John pierce
Several years back, there was a TV series called BIRDS OF PREY, in which one line of dialogue from one episode has always stood out in my memory: "Remember, high school is the closest thing our society has to institutionalized torture." I've spent nearly 47 years in high school -- four as a student, 38 as a public school teacher, and now almost five as a Christian school substitute teacher (not to mention a few weeks teaching a home-school class). I can agree with the line of dialogue. But I should also state that I think that high school can be one of the most exciting places to be, in spite of all the dangers and problems. I hope that, over the course of my career, I've helped at least a few people navigate their way through those sometimes-treacherous waters. None of this, of course, addresses the article's main topic, which was good, but I wanted to share this, anyway.
Doug Knox
Well said, Michelle. You struck a live nerve and revealed a deep truth. A few months ago, for example, my wife tried to introduce me to the Seinfeld series, but I finally had to ask her to excuse me from the DVD’s. Why? Because they dredged up memories of my high school angst...more than forty years ago. Watching them was more painful than funny. Your conclusion, “[I]t is not a full portrait of redemption if it divides us from our own humanity rather than redeeming it,” is spot on. Would that more Christian ministers recognized the truth that the proof of redemption lies in progress in real time rather than isolation in our dualistic corner while we eat our tuna sandwiches.
Tim Fall
"A new creation in Christ will count it all joy, and eat her tuna sandwich alone at her desk, humming 'Just A Closer Walk With Thee.'" My word, but that was funny Michelle. You had me chuckling at my desk. Good thing I wasn't eating my tuna sandwich or I might have choked! On church cliques, we've seen the effect they can have on our own family. For one group, we observed from the outside how the group's dynamics weren't all that healthy. In speaking with a member about it (someone who asked why we weren't joining in with them for things), she listened but said didn't see it the same way. Then a couple years later she no longer hung out as much with the same people. That's when she told us that she started seeing the same thing we'd observed. Yep, a lot like those HS dynamics. Cheers, Tim ( timfall.wordpress.com ) P.S. I saw The Breakfast Club in the theatre when it first came out. Loved it!
Gina Dalfonzo
This is so true! Well said, Michelle!
*