agonyaunt | (no subject)

Dear Annie: I am a 76-year-old woman who is still not over her teenage friendship troubles.

I should preface this entry by stating that I am by no means stuck in the past. This instance simply comes to mind whenever I face shortcomings in life.

I'll now set the scene: It was early September of 1962. I had just turned 17, and I was a senior in an all-girls Catholic high school. I was a particularly gifted student with mostly As and the occasional B-plus in history or arithmetic. My parents had a strong sense of pride in my work and thus had very high standards for my test scores.

My literature class proved to be much harder than I had expected, and at the very first test of the year, I flunked. I mean, I totally bombed it. I didn't want my parents to be upset with me, so I lied to them and said that I had gotten an A-minus.

My best friend at the time, "Lisa," who was also in this particular class, had gotten a very high score and, to put it nicely, she was not quiet about it. Later on that same week, my parents invited Lisa over for supper. As expected, she was boasting about her score. My parents had mentioned that I had also done well, to which Lisa answered, "What are you talking about? She practically bombed that test."

My parents found out the truth, and I was grounded until the end of the year. Not only that, I had lost trust in Lisa, although it was not her fault. I did not blame her.

About three months later was the big winter formal, where my school and the brother school down the road would gather for the dance. I, of course, was still grounded, but by a crazy turn of events, my angel of a mother decided to let me go. I hadn't told anybody I was going — not even Lisa.

When I got to the dance, I was horrified. It was a blast up until I overheard Lisa telling my classmates that I was a liar and a troublemaker. I did not speak to Lisa again after that.

I graduated high school and became a secretary at the front desk of a local office and moved on with life, but every time I experienced hardship, this instance would replay in my mind.

I feel that I am being held back by teenage drama. I feel that I have long moved past Lisa, but the feeling of betrayal I feel will never leave. — Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

Dear Pants on Fire: Despite what you say, it seems to me that a part of you is stuck in the past and continuing to harbor resentment toward Lisa. Sixty years, countless life experiences and surely many friendships later, this incident and Lisa's betrayal still hold power over you today.

Instead of replaying it in your mind or trying to work through it on your own, seek professional counseling. The help of an experienced therapist could be just what you need to finally free yourself from this recurring nightmare and make peace with your past.

You connect this instance to your "shortcomings," but do remember, a teenage fib to your parents and a failed test hardly define the person you grew up to become.

https://www.creators.com/read/dear-annie/11/21/high-school-still-haunts-me

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LW does not strike me as the most reliable of narrators - her insistence that she's gotten over this when she clearly hasn't is striking - but one thing leaps out at me.

A 3 month+ grounding over a single lie about a single bad grade is excessive. Even if LW was a chronic liar - and with punitive parents, I wouldn't blame her! - that's too much.

Her mother wasn't an "angel" for giving her a one-dance reprieve, because that punishment was OTT. (And I'm generously assuming "end of the year" means end of the calendar year instead of end of the school year, but who knows?)

I don't know what really went down between LW and Lisa. I do know that Lisa is not the person who betrayed LW's trust.

Also: It's a tragic irony of biology and fate that the very worst years of our lives, high school, are the ones that are strongest in our memories. Therapy can help contextualize them properly, but LW is definitely not the only person in the world who is too hung up on adolescence.

Part of the problem is that high school is so often cast as the best years of our lives. (Get me started on how people misread Springsteen's "Glory Days" sometime.) And yet so, so many people I know had awful experiences. I sometimes feel weird saying that school was not actually that bad and often pretty good for me (home was another issue entirely; you could not pay me to relive that).

And yeah, I agree on the unreliable narrator. Lisa betrayed her, but it wasn't her fault. She doesn't blame Lisa, but she can't get over it. I honestly think she's avoiding acknowledging that her parents were perhaps not such angels, and maybe not so much "proud" as "really overinvested in my academic success to the point that I felt like I had to lie about one bad test in a difficult class." I'm trying not to read too much into her post-high school path - there are many, many reasons people don't go to college - but I wonder if there were some expectations of her that she didn't meet, and was given shit over.

Anyway, therapy = yes. I think something like Dialectical Behavior Therapy (which includes a talk therapy requirement) would be good. OTOH, yes: many people have Issues about those years. OTOH, if she can put this in context, so much the better.

Part of the problem is that high school is so often cast as the best years of our lives.

A thoroughly unhealthy attitude. If it's never gonna get better than it was when you were 18, why live the next 60 years at all? Even if high school rocked, c'mon.

But yeah, best and worst - it's an incredibly emotional age, with most of the life passage events packed into it (and a few more are handled over the next few years immediately after graduation for most people), and for some reason that I don't get our brains really really REALLY like our adolescent memories. So of course it has an outsized role in our life history, the BEST or the WORST. (Probably doesn't help that when we were in high school, we still weren't developmentally great at nuance. Getting there!)

for some reason that I don't get our brains really really REALLY like our adolescent memories

Digging into the neuropsych I studied many years ago, I believe it has to do with the fact that there are significant amounts of the brain reorganising at the time, and so it lays down those memories really strongly. However, given that was 30 ish years ago, state of the science may have found a different explanation.

Isn't that the same reason they give us for early childhood amnesia? Learning language reorganizes the brain and, whoops, nearly all of those memories become totally inaccessible?

hmm. I didn't think it was the language learning. However, I don't actually remember the reasoning on that one. Adolescent psychology has been much more of what I've done, particularly in recent years.

ETA: this prompted me to go and try and look this up. Reasonable summary at https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/learning-memory/why-you-cant-remember-being-baby. Could do with better citations, but it roughly covers the various stages, and the current state of hypotheses on why neurological development has those effects on memories.

Edited 2021-12-06 14:34 (UTC)

Agree. I wonder if the reason she's hung up on this event is because hating Lisa was the solution she created for herself at the time to avoid examining her relationship with her parents, and it's continuing to niggle away at her because there's something Not Quite Right about her internal version of events but she can't put her finger on what it is.

Funny, I just said that in the comments over there! Great minds.

Honestly, that's my read on things.

I am nodding enthusiastically with all of this. I thank goddess daily that I don't have to go all the way back to high school (graduated 1978) for the best years of my life.

She said she doesn't blame Lisa for the original incident. The betrayal was hearing Lisa talk shit about her behind her back. It's a run of the mill asshole teenager move, but it's still an asshole move. (It's also not something I would expect to be still hung up on sixty years later, so clearly she does have a lot of issues. Just, Lisa definitely was an asshole in that instance.)

I mean, I agree with you, and I might actually still be hung up on something like that - actually, I still am hung up on an incident in which two people (roommates) I thought liked me bitched about me for an hour while they thought I was sleeping. I've always had a kind of insecurity about people who allegedly love/like me not really doing so (you've read my sibling sagas, right?), but that sent it through the roof, and it still manifests when I have conflict with friends.

What was I saying?

Oh, yeah: it was an asshole move. And actually, I think LW would do well to label it an asshole move in an effort to move on from it. I just don't think she knows that.

Yeah, it probably was an asshole move, but to be fair, we have no idea what really went down at dinner that day. LW's narration has so many gaping holes in it that my guess is that, in an effort to protect herself from unwarranted parental wrath, she duly threw Lisa under the bus.

Which didn't work, hence the grounding, but I can understand why Lisa would be so pissed off she'd be talking about it months later.