Feelings of the Young

I picked up my sister late tonight (she had been performing in a school musical), and she cried on the way home. (I really hope she'll forgive me for writing about this. Of course, I'm not even sure she reads this blog...) She was crying about a boy.

You know, my natural inclination when I hear about teenage attachments is to assume that they're somehow less valid or real than 'adult' attachments or feelings. I started wondering today why that was the case, when I sat in silence with my sister as I drove her home. Here she was, right next to me, and she was filled with a pain that I remembered experiencing, but that I no longer felt. I think that's often why people who are older tend to dismiss the feelings of the young. It's not that, in our perfect memories, we look back and sagely realize how immature those feelings were--it's that distance separates us from our past feelings. They seem shallow and immature because we no longer feel them. What we remember is only a fossil of those former feelings--all the flesh wasted away, and even the living bones replaced with rock.

Now, I'm not saying that there's not a difference between what you feel as a 16-year-old and what you feel as a 27-year-old. Perhaps the things that spark those feelings of affection are a little more arbitrary: appearance, social standing, the fact that a guy actually talked with you... But, I do want to point out that I think we forget with what intensity the young feel. Becca, you talked about this on your blog, and I was struck by it, but I didn't really connect what you said with my own personal feelings.

Now, after seeing my sister cry like that, I can remember a little better about not only how real those feelings seemed to me when I was a teenager, but how real they actually were.