“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
When I was in late adolescence, about 17 years old, I read the book The Great Gatsby. By that age, I was in full brooding mode, and anything that came close to the depth of self-wallowing was, in my opinion, to be studied further. This book made me feel, among other things, that all the knowledge, from all the great books in the world that had ever and would ever exist, were as unreachable and unattainable as that green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock must have seemed to Gatsby.
At the time, I thought that I was not a typical adolescent, but in many ways I was a textbook case. In the aspects of cognitive development, biological pubertal changes and events, gender expectations, and the Imaginary Audience and Personal Fable experience, my adolescence matched the textbook information very closely. But in other areas such as the concept of Storm and Stress (rebelling and experiencing a huge disconnect from my parents; experimentation in drugs or alcohol) and in dating or romantic relationships, it did not. There are reasons for these departures, and I will discuss them later in this essay.
Developmentally, in hindsight, I was right on track according the Adolescent Development textbook. Cognitive development introduced more and more complexity into my thinking and the appreciation of metaphor and metacognition (Arnett, 66). I went from liking the soft accessibility of Monet and Renoir to Picasso abstracts and Henry Moore sculptures. I graduated from self-indulging lonely adolescent novels, to more expansive literature that challenged my pre-existing beliefs about the world. Poetry and music suddenly seemed like something a person my age could truly appreciate. I read The Great Gatsby again in my mid-twenties and understood it in a completely new way. I felt that I now understood the characters, their losses, and the choices they made in a more nuanced way. The characters’ personal struggles and issues that Fitzgerald had written about now had many dimensions to them and I no longer saw them as black or white, but instead very, very grey. For example, I decided to rethink my original adolescent characterizations; I now saw Jay Gatsby as partially responsible for his own delusions instead of being the misunderstood romantic hero; and I now saw Daisy Buchanan as someone trapped by her expected roles in society, instead of the spoiled, fickle little rich girl. Arnett explains: “…formal operational thinkers are more likely to see things in greater complexity and perceive multiple aspects of a situation or an idea.” (65)
While I had no other girlfriends to speak to about my experience and my mother didn’t live with us nor had she ever mentioned it, I was lucky enough to have a few older women in my life that told me about what to expect in "becoming a woman", and they made it all seem so normal. I don’t remember ever feeling anything in particular about my new-found maturation, besides monthly cramps. But I do remember thinking it wasn’t fair. That feeling that things needed to be or were not fair, in my eyes, has stuck with me to this day.
With regards to gender expectations and gender norms, it was so much a part of my environment that I never stepped out of it to view it as it existed. However, two things in particular focused an intense spotlight on this subject for me as an adolescent. My father remarried when I was 12 years old, and up till then for almost four years, he had been a very capable single parent who cooked, cleaned and did all other needed household chores. The day he and my step-mother returned from their honeymoon, it was as if a switch in him went off and he never cooked another meal again. We would often joke about his sudden amnesia in the kitchen, but this was a clear case of the social roles theory at work (Arnett, 143). Now that there was a wife in the family again, it was the wife’s role to cook and take care of the kitchen, among other household chores. And there didn’t seem to be any struggle with this transition. Everyone contributed to the acceptance and perpetuation of these social roles.
The second thing regarding gender happened when I was approximately 16 years old. My father and step-mother broke the news to me one night that a girl of my age should not be out alone riding my bike after dark anymore. I know they were trying to protect me, but the only thing I could think at the time was that they were wrong and it just wasn’t fair. Why did I have to stop what I loved doing because someone else might decide to harm me, and besides, I could easily speed away on my bike? Instead of trying to equip me with a sense of choice and forethought, some useful tips on what I might do if I encountered some difficulty, my parents chose to take my choice away from me because I was (almost) a woman. My freedom needed to be restricted, and I was responsible for removing myself as a temptation to men. This was just another one of the constrictions placed on females (of almost any culture) because of the cultural perception of females as fragile, weak and needing protection (Arnett, 128) combined with the cultural perception of males as being more powerful and unable to control themselves sexually.
The last aspect of adolescence I will discuss, where my experience matches very closely with the textbook information, is Adolescent Egocentrism. Our textbook tells us that “adolescents become less egocentric than younger children as they learn to take the perspectives of others. However, cognitive development in adolescence also leads to new kinds of egocentrism that are distinctly adolescent.” (Arnett, 80). This new egocentrism is what I experienced as the Imaginary Audience and Personal Fable, two things that Elkind had divided adolescent egocentrism into (Arnett, 81).
Arnett explains Imaginary Audience this way: “Because they think about themselves so much and are so acutely aware of how they might appear to others, they conclude that others must also be thinking about them a great deal…they imagine a rapt audience for their appearance and behaviour.”(Arnett, 81). I would often listen to music on my Sony walkman and as I walked in public with my headphones on, I imagined that I was being filmed for the music video. I also attributed far too many meanings to completely innocuous encounters with others, especially with boys. If they happened to glance my way, they were obviously interested in me and had a crush on me, or the next day, that same glance by that same boy could mean that they thought I was ugly and were making fun of me.
“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Personal Fable is built on the Imaginary Audience idea. “Adolescents’ belief in the uniqueness of their personal experiences and their personal destiny is the personal fable.” (Arnett, 81). When I was 17 years old, I met the man I would marry five years later. My sense of happiness, tragedy and fate at this age was at an all-time high and I was convinced, in this relationship, that my life was nothing short of a Homeric epic. At this age I could not comprehend that perhaps my Personal Fable was filling in some parts of the story of my romantic relationship and that —as is normally found in fables— this man was my soul mate. He understood me like nobody would ever be able to.
Where my experience of adolescence departs from the textbook can be attributed to my father’s strict religious upbringing of my brother and I. It was the reason that we did not, as adolescents within the Western majority culture, get to experience what our peers did in certain domains; no increased conflict with parents, great emotional upheavals, or risky behaviour, which some scholars would describe as the “Storm and Stress” period (Arnett, 12, 157). We were not allowed to go to parties or dances in high school; dating was not allowed, even though most Western adolescents do it (Arnett, 104); and because of those things, we were never in a situation where we could experiment with drugs or use alcohol.
Relationships were not encouraged, unless it was a friendship within the church. All adolescent gatherings needed chaperones and they could not be left alone, even if the gathering included plenty of people. We were not allowed to form friendships and do regular adolescent things outside of the church. Going to a movie with a school friend was out of the question. My father’s and the church’s reasoning was that outsiders were bad influences that could introduce something forbidden to us and tempt us to disobey god. This led a lot of young people in my church to marry as early as they could (usually by age 20), just to obtain the kind of freedom they needed. Emerging adults naturally feel this pulling away from their parents and faith anyway (Arnett, 110) and marriage seemed to be the only reasonable excuse elders would accept. Regarding my religiosity, from the age of 16 to 25, I went from being a “Committed Traditionalist”, to a “Selective Adherent”, to finally being “Spiritually Open” (Arnett, 110).
Perhaps because of this narrow socialization in my social life, but in no other aspects of my life, my sexuality and risky behaviour developed later. My timing seemed to be off; I did not delve into drinking, drugs, and promiscuity until much later in adulthood. This behaviour lasted from my mid-twenties until my early-thirties. I always faulted my strict adolescent years for this period in my life. My father’s push to have us join the ministry and ignore higher education combined with the strict social rules he placed on us could easily have led to a premature “identity foreclosure” (Arnett, 163). Perhaps this adolescent behaviour in my late twenties had more to do with an “identity exploration” that I was still trying to finish (Arnett, 163).
I moved out of my family home at the age of 19. I no longer know what to say about that when I re-tell this story. I believed then everything was ahead of me, and I soon forgot my strict parents, god and all the rules I left behind. But I never forgot how unfair I thought it all was. At 19 years of age, I still thought I was special and that the poetry and novels I had been writing in my head for years would come spewing out of me now that I was free. But …
”…that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
