What about you now would be unfathomable to your teenage self?

In My Humble Opinion
61

He’d be surprised that I hadn’t died by now, like several other posters.

He’d be shocked beyond belief that I regularly get in front of large groups of people and give hours-long presentations without imploding from shyness. He wouldn’t be surprised that I still miss a day here and there hiding from the world. (It’s scary out there).

He’d be surprised that I have a good relationship with my sister; wouldn’t be surprised that I have no relationship with either of my parents.

He’d be pretty happy that I didn’t fall by the wayside like so many others in my old neighborhood, and that I have rock-solid finances.

He probably wouldn’t be surprised that I’d still be single at 45, nor that I see a shrink.

He’d come in his pants when he saw my motorcycle, then hate me for claiming that I don’t have enough time to ride it very often.

62

Twenty-four and still not in a serious relationship. :frowning:

63

I would be shocked that I was able to escape the abusive relationship I was in. (The relationship started at 14 and I left right before 18.)

The things I take for granted today that I didn’t have then. A home, a loving husband, three kids whom I adore, a truck that I didn’t have to borrow money to get, or be afraid I would come home to my things being stolen/sold. I have more possessions than I could have ever imagined then.
The fact that I reclaimed myself, and enjoy every loving minute of it.
I get along with my parents for the most part, and have helped them out financially over the years.
I abandoned being blonde, and prefer red, or my natural brown hair color.
I look nothing at all like I did then.

So good things in general, but my teenage self wouldn’t be able to fathom it because of the situation I was in.

64

Also, I wouldn’t tell this to my teenaged self, but I have had much, much less sex than I expected to in life. But there’s still time!..right?

65

I was trapped in an inbred, racist, small town, largely an outsider and in a disintegrating family that barely squeaked into the middle class. I barely passed the minimum french required for university and had zero mastery of the language. My writing skills were poor as well. I liked to camp and backpack, but had horrible equipment and couldn’t go anywhere more interesting than the Sierra Nevada’s. I was always college bound and knew I needed to escape the small inbred town although didn’t want to live in the big city. And I also didn’t think I’d survive my 20’s.

As a teenager, I always knew I would have no help from anyone and have to make my own way in the world. And I wanted to make my own way my own way, but had no idea of how to do it or any kind of guidance (to be fair, i also wasn’t receptive to guidance). My China decision turned out pretty well in the long run. :slight_smile:

My teenage self would be heartened to know I got out of the small towns. Ha, I’ve lived in cities in the 5 to 15 million population range for 20 years. Also be heartned to know that hard work can bridge language gaps, and now I have business level Mandarin Chinese, and speak Japanese, Cantonese and Shanghaiese better than I ever did French. My backpacking self managed to get a bit better equipment and spent about 6 months altogether backing in Tibet, and more than a month backpacking in different parts of Japan (Hokkaido, Japan Alps, Chichibu Okutama area). unfortunately, now that I have some primo trekking equipment and can afford anything at REI or Northface, I can’t get away to hike any more. Also that now I can afford just about anything I want, I still don’t want much and am a very poor consumer.

Teenager thought one would go to university, graduate, sell out and work for the man, and by 30 be married with 2.5 kids and a career in management. And that seemed like a horrible fate. I didn’t start a real career in a multinational until I was 31, married a few years later, had the first child at 40, bought the first condo with cash at 40, and had twins at 43.

I wish I could teach my teenage self that to get along, go along. Not to be a sheeple but being caustic, acerbic and obnoxious isn’t a good way to get through life. I was in my 30’s before finally exorcising my demons and figuring out that picking battles/focusing on the important things was a helluva lot easier than leading with the chip on my shoulder.

66

That I’m libertarian, Christian, and objectivist.

67

My sixteen year old self from early in the Reagan administration would be mildly surprised that the world hadn’t ended in a nuclear holocaust (of course there is always still time for that but overall it seems less likely now than then).

He would probably be happy that I did not in fact try to make a career in computer science, a field my parents tried to push me into (it was pretty much all they knew) but that I had no interest in.

He would also probably be amazed at the extent to which economic/financial issues are not an overriding concern. It’s not like I have piles of money laying around but I’m better off than I thought I would be back then. A stable job, even some semblance of a career path in a growing industry, a nice house and cars have all come easier than I would have dared hope.

On the downside he would be totally horrified at the issues that have arisen recently in my marriage, and their mental/emotional toll on all concerned.

68

Great question.

My teenaged self would be stunned at my whole life, both where I am now and the adventures that led me here. None of it’s particularly noteworthy, but it’s far more than I was hoping for: husband of 20 years, house that I like a lot, wonderful kids about whom I’m passionate, a tiny bit of art career for myself…never thought I’d be here. I just couldn’t picture it.

She would also be understanding about the problems that still plague me. Pretty much all of them were evident then, and in fact more pronounced.

She would be particularly flabbergasted at how the rest of my family’s lives have progressed. My parents’ journey from about 45-65 has been a total shock.

69

My teenage self would be shocked by: my atheism, my gay partner, my silent guitar (used to play for 3 hours a night —at least). I think that’s all of which my former self would disapprove, though the first two are pretty biggies.

My younger self would be surprised but not judgemental over a few things too. As others have said the fact that I’m still alive would amaze him. His fundie parents taught him that everyone decent would be raptured and soon. He thought this would happen somewhere between late adolescence and early adulthood. He’d be surprised that I love hiking. I hated the outdoors as a kid.

He’d be amazed and proud that I built my house. I was such a klutz as a teenager. He’d also beam that his older self had two college degrees and had managed his money well enough to take off time from the working world to be creative; so he’d be a little forgiving that the guitar hadn’t been picked up in a while. After the initial gay thing sank in, which would take a hefty-bit-o-time, he’d be appreciative that his future relationship would be so happy and strong after 11 years and that it appeared to be a lifetime engagement.

70

Hah, my teenage self would wonder why I’m not obsessed with girls/women and wonder why I would rather avoid them altogether.

Please understand, I am not trying to insult your success rate; but merely share my own horror tales of being afraid of women.

71

I’d be flabbergasted to find out that I’ve worked in a factory for over a decade, and am apprenticing to become an industrial electrician at 37.

I never planned on owning a house, always figured I’d have some gorgeously empty loft apartment in The Big City to go along with that high-powered marketing executive job.

That I have a kid, I swore I never would. That I’ve been a single mom forever, and that I’m not a granola-crunching earth momma steeped in counter-culture, which is how I figured kids should be raised. Other people’s kids, at least, since I wasn’t going to be spawning any.
Instead I have a child with ADHD/Asperger’s and I’m always trying to get him to conform, go figure.

72

I’m not THAT far from my teenage years, and frankly, currently-25-year-old me is still pretty shocked.

I was certain I’d be a biologist of some stripe when I grew up. I loved science, and always did well in it. Biology was my passion. I was also terrible at languages. So imagine my surprise to find myself dedicating my life to the study of… ancient history? Which requires intensive study of really hard languages, like Latin and ancient Greek, plus a bunch more modern languages and a smattering of less popular ancient ones. Every once in a while I think about it, and I’m still stunned at where I am.

Other than that, I was obsessed with my long hair, and had literal nightmares about someone cutting it. I would never, ever have believed that I adore having really short hair. Like, ‘part of it done with clippers’ short.

73

I think the most shocking thing to me is how much I care about politics. As a young person I most strongly identified with creative exploits–literature, art, music. I was smart, but ignorant. I hated history and government and issues like economy–they bored me to tears and I didn’t consider myself particularly good at anything one would call ‘‘practical.’’ I prided myself on being emotional, creative, spiritual, and thinking with my heart. Rational was a dirty word.

If someone had told me that by the time I graduated college one of my greatest passions would be the study of U.S. foreign policy’s impact on Latin America, I would have laughed in their face. I could be a novelist, a musician, even a spiritual guru–but someone who takes pleasure in research? Not even that, but the research of international politics? WTF?

In general I wouldn’t have been able to fathom the intellectual changes in store for me. At age 17, I couldn’t even tell you what capitalism was. Within weeks of starting college, I was bunking with the first Jewish person I had ever met in my entire life, watching the World Trade Center collapse on CNN, reading Nietzsche, talking to Marxists, and discussing immigration in Spanish. It is like my entire universe was 2-D until I got to college. And then everything sort of exploded into a wonderland of light and color and sound. I found passions, like philosophy, that I didn’t even know existed. Hell, I even became a Buddhist.

Probably the greatest example of this intellectual awakening was my final thesis paper in my senior year Spanish class… the topic was open, it was a literature course, and I wrote about NAFTA’s impact on Mexican economy, particularly the shift from the agricultural industry to the manufacturing industry. A part of me still cannot believe that I chose to write about that–and enjoyed it, thoroughly, and look forward to similar opportunities in graduate school. I still love the arts, but now they are at home beside a well-developed sense of critical thinking. I consider myself a pragmatist, and that is not a dirty word.

As an emotional/creative being I have grown in maturity and wisdom since the age of 17, but there I still recognize myself. Intellectually, I am someone else entirely.

74

I, for one, would be shocked at a large number of things. The notion of fitting into a ‘small’ size T-shirt would have been unfathomable. In the past, I would have been way too self-conscious to wear something that form-fitting. Now, I can appear in public shirtless and feel okay about myself. Tanktops and tight shirts are de rigeur for me these days. After being told by enough people that I’m a rather attractive man, I’m finally starting to believe them.

Also, the fact that I have grown to love my home state would have shocked me. I am quite happy being a Floridian; all my life, I wanted to leave and move off to, say, Oregon, but now, I would have no particular objections of staying here. I like the weather (hurricanes and all), the people are friendly enough and there’s a whole lot of beautiful nature all around here. And I doubt I could live without Key lime pie and cheap produce…

The notion that I could consider an entire day spent in my room on the computer to be a wasted day would have been inconceivable to my teenage self. I like getting out and doing things; the walls of my apartment get kinda claustrophobic after a while.

75

Hmmm, let’s see:

  1. That I am an astronomer – my 14/15 year old self whilst good at maths, hated it, and refused to continue at it beyond 16. Thank goodness for a quirk of timetabling that meant I had to do maths with the other A-level options I’d chosen.

  2. That I can cook as well as my mum does, to the point that my dad finds it difficult to tell who’s cooked what.

  3. That I’m actually attractive to members of the opposite sex and not the girl whose “only redeeming feature” was “fit ankles”.

76

My teen self was a lazy slug who could not imagine a life where he might have to spend 8 hours a day working. The thought was anathema to him. He got by as best he could with doing as little as possible. (Oddly, he still always believed that he would someday be rich.)

He would never believe what I have achieved and what I do for a living.

77

Life is too short for a serious relationship.

78

My teenaged self would refuse to believe that I’m a vet. You simply wouldn’t be able to convince him that his twenty-something self would graduate college and then up and join the army for reasons that his thirty-something self has a hard time remembering. That’s probably the big one.

He would also be bowled over by the fact that I didn’t become a high school teacher. And that I decided in the end not to have children of my own. He took it for a given that I would be a high school teacher with two or three kids before I was thirty.

Speaking of careers, if my teenaged self found out that I was seriously considering going back to school to begin a second career in accounting . . . well, maybe seeing into the future is kind of a bad thing. Teens go through enough in high school without putting that shit in their heads.

79

My teenage self would be pleasantly surprised, I think, that I actually managed to get to where he wanted to be at age 24. I was a huge slacker in high school, and I barely made it into a painfully obscure liberal-arts college. For that matter, I came close to failing high school Senior English - I’d have been held back for that. It was an open question whether I’d do well in college, or fail out my first year - but I did well. Very well, actually.

Now, I’m a law student in DC, and (with a bit of luck) I’ll be an actual DC lawyer in a bit over a year. I think my teenage self would give me a hearty high-five for that. :smiley:

On the other hand, he’d be very unhappy with the fact I’m still single - and in fact, that I’ve stayed single ever since high school. I have absolutely no more luck with the fairer sex than my teenage self did, and I imagine he’d have harsh words to say on the subject. He’d also be a little surprised that I drink now - Teenage Mr. Excellent thought alcohol was a wholly inadequate substitute for caffeine.

80

Well, first I’d have to reach for the atlas and check the location of this country my older self now lives in, called “the Dominican Republic”. I don’t think I’d heard of it when I was a teenager.

Other than that, I would be surprised at how little I’ve changed physically, the fact that I don’t dress like my teenage image of a woman in her mid-40s, and that I mellowed ideologically and didn’t end up in an lesbian anarchist eco-warrior commune.