# Adolescence

By Nina Lu · 2022-07-06 · Things That Matter (Medium) · Original: https://medium.com/@ninajlu/things-that-matter-adolescence-e9da98aac098

_Would you re-live your adolescence if you could?_

Boundless hours of unstructured time — free from the worries of having to support yourself and deal with real adult concerns. The loving and doting presence of parents and a world that ended at the sidewalks of your suburban neighborhood, small enough to grasp in your tiny hands and feel like you really understood. Or maybe adolescence was a time of unspeakable turmoil for you, marked by traumas you don’t want to recall, incessant bullying, isolation, violence, or instability. For most people, adolescence was probably somewhere in between those two extremes, punctuated with blissful carefree moments before you were a person but also attendant growing pains and a healthy dose of awkwardness.

The more people I’ve met, the more I am shocked by the diversity of experiences and emotions that are encompassed by the same word — _adolescence._ It seems that the only thing that connects these multitudes of human experiences is the relentless march of time, propelling one from a vulnerable, hapless toddler to an independent being in an adult-ish form, deposited unceremoniously into a chaotic world.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on positive and negative feedback loops and the ways experiences during this formative adolescent period defines a person’s approach, values, and the expectations for the world and the lens through which they filter their life. _Is the world kind and helpful or is it harsh and out to get you?_ Your expectations are determined by experiences that positively or negatively reinforced certain thought patterns until some neural paths become so well-trodden, they become instinctual and automatic.

The modern understanding of mental illness, while decidedly crude, would suggest both biological and external contributors to the development of brain disorders and the wide spectrum of neuroses. This is the classic nature v. nurture argument which I think most people would agree was concluded with an unsatisfactory “both play a role”. Biologically, your genes and DNA predispose you to certain patterns of thought and rumination. Then, external situations — the obvious (e.g. abuse, a death in the family, bullying) and the less obvious (e.g. minute differences in parenting styles, birth order, feelings of belonging and security, impacts of good and bad teachers, teasing from friends and family, daily stresses) — then trigger and reinforce maladaptive or suboptimal thought processes and make them more and more engrained.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/889/0*8EC7OslWqSvIkT3l)

Yes, you can be an astronaut-ballerina-snowflake.

In my own experience of adolescence, I can point to multiple significant contributors to the development of unhealthy mental loops. I inherited a predisposition to rumination from my mother and a grandiose desire for exceptionalism and impact from my father. Growing up, I was constantly compared to my older sister, who was intelligent, artistic, athletic, graceful, and beautiful. Julie was preternaturally gifted and competent at so many things — art, music, volleyball, writing, and school — it was hard not to feel like a total and complete waste of space in her shadow.

Many things did not come easily for me. I remember Chinese school was a harrowing experience for me because we had weekly quizzes (tingxie) where we would have to write new sets of 10–20 vocabulary words. For Julie, with her seemingly photographic memory, these were a breeze, requiring no studying besides a quick flip through the words an hour before class on Sundays. For me, this required assiduously copying and re-copying the words over and over again across multiple pages of paper, creative and sometimes ineffectual mnemonics and other brain hacks, and still resulted frequently in embarrassing mistakes. Characters seemed to slip through my brain like sand through a sieve. I was able to manage only through dogged persistence and masochistic self-flagellation.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/320/0*qqBdNsQuYcZY5Kvm.jpg)

Tingxie literally translates to “listen, write” also known as medieval torture.

This negative feedback loop was accentuated by my parent’s fixed mindset approach to the world, where people were either talented at any given skill or a waste of space, either intelligent or stupid, either in possession of a good memory or in possession of a rotten one, either destined for the Olympics or wholly un-athletic. This lead to a sense of learned helplessness in me. If I would never be as good as my sister, why try? I whiled away art classes tracing over my art teacher’s lines, afraid to try for fear my work would look pitifully inadequate next to my sister’s superb still life. My deficiencies, real or imaginary, led me to retract from playing the game, until these deficiencies became real. My sister progressed to higher levels of art class and more challenging mediums while I stagnated. When my sister was brought to the next room and we no longer took art classes together, it seemed like the cement in the coffin confirming my complete and utter lack of artistic ability and competence. In a conversation with my therapist as an adult, she asked me why I never took the approach of “Wow, I was in the same art class as my sister who is two years older than me! Of course she was better than me or maybe I was even ahead of my skill level for children my age” — but alas, no. I never saw it like that. Probably because of the fixed mindset belief. I just decided that I was entirely untalented and a waste of space.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/633/0*OqS9B29n1CvsksoY.jpg)

Alternative multiverse timeline where I am Frida Kahlo and paint portraits of Sailor Moon like a boss.

It is challenging and traumatic to always be in someone’s shadow — that person becomes larger than life to you. This is why it was funny to me when I saw my sister’s drivers license recently and realized she was only 5'5". In my mind, she had always stood so much taller than me, always one step ahead and always, always better than me. Realizing she was a petite Asian woman shorter than me as an adult made me realize how much I had aggrandized her in my head. It is not a bad thing; I love and look up to my sister more than anyone else in the world and she has been the biggest shaper of who I am today. It is just funny how warped my adolescent perceptions were.

It is also challenging and traumatic to forge your own path. I am grateful to my sister now for being good at so many things — she challenged me to find areas I could uniquely excel and gave me the mandate to be different. This helped me find things that I was good at — coding and building — and find hobbies that I enjoyed just for the sake of doing them, regardless of my skill level — playing guitar, writing, and armchair philosophy.