The other day, I stumbled across some photographs of myself taken in my teenage years. Think I was around sixteen, seventeen or so? These visual relics brought back some vivid memories of a time when the mind and body are going through huge changes, something everyone experiences. It struck me, though. Writing about my journey with Multiple Sclerosis and its impact now. This symptom, that change, how I deal with it. Confusion, frustration, elation, fear. Sleepless nights thinking about stuff that might happen or might not. It can feel a little like I have gone back in time and am a teenager again. But a reverse teenager, trying to make sense of a world that is personally contracting, not expanding.
First there was The Incredible Shrinking Man. Now The Amazing Reverse Teenager! A lot of the same stuff the original teenager had to deal with. Just in the reverse direction!
The Parallels
Of course, it’s not a perfect match and a lot of the behaviour is very different. For example, the original teenager did not get out of bed before midday whilst the reverse teenager is often up before seven AM. As for going to bed? Well, the original teenager did not usually do that much before two AM, even if there was nothing happening. Too much work to brush teeth and all that sort of stuff. Conversely, the reverse teenager is usually in bed by eleven thirty with a book. Usually, not always! And the reverse teenager certainly does not fall asleep on the bonnet of his mother’s car drunk. One of the finer moments for the original.
Uncontrolled Change
The parallels are not exact. Yet both are dealing with uncontrolled change in body and mind and neither is always sure how to deal with it. The original teenager was growing, starting to look outward. The reverse teenager has the opposite, a slow decline, that contraction mentioned earlier. That’s how it can feel. Both the original and reverse teenager can get emotional and confused. Both are prone to real lows and massive highs. They can also feel a little isolated, as though no-one gets it. Strange that the experience at two very different stages in life can feel so similar.
An Older Mind
For all those similarities, the difference between the forty-nine-year-old reverse teenager and the sixteen-year-old original are huge. Those twenty-eight years between the two have been well and truly lived. I’ve been lucky to see so much, meet so many. Sometimes there’s a tinge of regret that more wasn’t experienced when I was fit enough to do so but how was I to know what was to come? In simple terms, the reverse teenager has the benefit of twenty-eight more years of life experience than the original.
It can be difficult to use that experience when you’re in the thick of emotion. Dealing with a fall or facing something that used to be so easy and now requires planning and consideration like walking to the shops, for example. Or those days when the words are just not coming out of the mouth correctly and consequentially I just feel a bit stupid. The journey isn’t always smooth. sometimes the reverse teenager’s response are totally irrational and all that life experience feels like it counts for nothing.
The Amazing Reverse Teenager
The Amazing Reverse Teenager might sound like a flippant or oversimplified idea, but sometimes a little humour is the only way to make sense of it all. This is certainly not a proposal for a new superhero! Rather, this is just an attempt to try to put the confusion of uncontrolled change into some sort of perspective. Try to explain something that can be difficult to put into words. My mind and body are going through so many changes that it is challenging to feel in control leading to extremes of emotion, just like adolescence. So, here I am, riding the hurricane. Trying to make sense of it all.
Long forgotten adolescence, captured in those old photographs, suddenly feels so much closer. For better or worse it feels like the reverse teenager is here. Better learn how to embrace this as part of the MS experience.