The Structure of Adolescence
[Middle school marks] a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.
The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet.
Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.
The Private Room as Self
For any adolescent, a private bedroom is both sanctuary and mood board. It’s a safe haven for experimental selfies, a shelter for incognito-mode Google searches, an internal switchboard for the exchange of secrets and dreams.
Ritual and the Projection of Future Selves
It would be easy, having made it safely past the shores of puberty, to make light of these rituals and ablutions. But the rituals are very important — in fact, they’re everything. They’re experiments with externalizing private self-perceptions, and dalliances with potential selves. They’re a way of projecting into the future: to imagine being noticed, maybe even seen.
The Clothing of Aspiration
It felt like an A.I. hallucination of nineties fashion. I was immediately transported to my own preteen cabinet of horrors [...] In a season of knockoff Kate Spade bags, bar-mitzvah pencil skirts, and gratuitous training bras, it had produced in me a sick, horny covetousness: not for the clothes themselves, but for the idea of womanhood — flirty, filled-out, smoochable — that they implied.
In the early eighties, Neil Postman, the media theorist and critic, argued that the boundary between childhood and adulthood had long been one of information asymmetry — adults had secrets, whereas children had only their natural instincts and limited experience — and it was eroding [...] Children were exposed early to death, sex, violence, and money; one consequence, Postman claimed, was an undifferentiated culture in which children acted like adults and adults acted like children.
[I]n their eager imitation of maturity, they conveyed an incomplete but inevitably uncomplimentary reflection of adult life.
The Cognitive Dissonance of Being Twelve
Early adolescence was a sustained state of cognitive dissonance. It was a time of learning to take yourself seriously while wearing Unicorn Snot; of being clothed and transported by your parents while seeing them as critically as anyone ever would. It was a period when you could be aware of violent, sexual, criminal abuses of power; immediately identify the sexism of a “vintage” workplace dramedy; and mostly find the boys in your own life annoying. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and fleeting.
Young people changed quickly and not on any predetermined schedule. From the relatively static vantage of adulthood, it could feel like any given day with a kid was your last day with that version of them.
One of the most salient features of twelve, after all, is that it comes right before thirteen.
The Brevity of the Final Season
Watching Mira and her chatty, cheerful gaggle, it was strange to know, with no necessary qualifications other than having once been a preteen girl myself, that within the next year, or two, or three, they would be pulled into all manner of minor dramas and major insecurities, make transformative cultural discoveries, experience lifelong personal revelations. They’d have crushes, keep secrets, be teased, or be cruel. They’d be tempted to betray themselves or others. They’d outgrow their own taste, pull away from their siblings, stop laughing so hard and so freely at their parents’ jokes. They’d toss the heavily flavored balms and bottles of candy-scented spritz in the subsequent room refresh, time capsules from the final season of childhood.