Overcoming Teenage Challenges

I grew up middle class, and for most of my early years I had what I needed and most of what I wanted. My friends and family backed me up. I played sports seriously enough to win at the state level, I did fine in school, and I spent a lot of time around other people. From the outside my life looked solid, and inside it mostly felt that way too. My friendships were good. I was steady.

Then my family moved to a new state partway through high school, and that steadiness came apart. The move cut me off from the people I was close to, and I landed somewhere unfamiliar with nobody around me. I had never really been away from home before, so the new faces and new surroundings made me uneasy in a way I had not felt. For the first time I can remember, I got shy and self-conscious.

That was the start of social anxiety for me, though I had no name for it then. It set off a habit of avoiding things, and that avoidance kept me from reaching out or asking anyone for help through the rest of my teens. I convinced myself that asking for help would basically announce to everyone that something was wrong with me. Staying quiet felt safer than showing a weak spot, so I stayed quiet.

The isolation fed on itself. I started thinking of myself as a loner, like it was just my nature. Nobody could understand me, I figured, partly because I couldn't understand myself. My behavior at school got strange enough that it got back to my parents, who took me to a doctor for antidepressants. But the problem was never chemical for me. It was social.

The depression did not show up in small, manageable doses. It seeped in and flattened me before I had any chance to brace for what came next. What hurt most was the loneliness, which I couldn't shake for years. My drive dried up. I stopped wanting to engage with anything. On top of that came an eating disorder and insomnia, both tangled up with the depression. With no social life left, my self-esteem bottomed out and I decided I was a complete failure. I tried to outrun the pain with music and various distractions, and none of it did much. During those years I kept my attention fixed on how much I hated the way I was living, and I missed whatever good was actually around me.

Things did turn, though it was slow. The shift started when I saw that I was keeping these states alive from the inside. From there I leaned on my own will as the way out. That meant deliberately walking into situations that made me uncomfortable and pushing myself to try things I would normally avoid. I took up meditation and practiced staying with the present moment, and I spent a lot of time asking myself hard questions about who I actually was.

I began letting myself notice small things that moved me: birds, wind through the trees, the plain fact of being alive. Gratitude for that ordinary stuff helped more than I expected. I also met the person who is now my life partner, and she has kept me moving forward and looking for reasons to keep growing. Life connects with me far more these days. I'm doing work I love and slowly building a store of inner strength and confidence I did not have before.

None of this was quick. It took years. But getting myself through that dark stretch of my teens gave me a kind of strength I would not trade. And you can get there too.

-Anonymous Contributor