Stupid shit we did as teens which might suggest powerful drugs and surgery are not the choices to be made at that time

[TheBuffster]

People always arguing children 'know themselves' have the rights to access hormone blockers and surgeries because it's disrespectful to suggest they might not be emotionally mature enough to understand the long term consequences.

But does anyone else remember being an absolute plinker as a teenager? And making really stupid decisions?

Like how I was into Wicca and thought I was a witch.

Wearing knee high boots, skirt and no tights (later fishnets) in the day.

The boots were bloody pink too.

Using sun in even though my mum said it would turn my hair ginger.

Predictably accidentally dying my hair stupid colours by accident, including sick orange and traffic light red.

Drinking vodka in broad daylight and getting it taken off me by the police.

Walking home alone back from nightclubs.

The list of idiocy is endless. Thank goodness I had no access to dangerous surgery.

Anyone else?

Now I have small children, thinking back to the things I did as a teen makes my blood run cold.

Life-threatening, reckless, idiot things. I wish, frankly, that I'd been stopped from making some of the damn fucking stupid choices I'd made.

Thankfully most of them didn't have life-long consequences, and I managed to pull things back and eventually get on the meandering and narrow.

don't get me started on the fact the the brain isn't fully developed until mid 20s

And that's with normal puberty, of course.

(A tangential thought re brain development - I wonder if there's any work being done on the impact of electronic devices and gaming, SM, FOMO etc - are they resulting in more youngsters not getting enough good quality sleep nowadays and if so how does this affect brain maturation?)

There are lots of MNetters who are into Wicca and who fuck up hair colouring.

Isn't this what Gillick competency is all about?

I'm not really up for stereotyping young people or seeing involvement in Wicca as being similar to having a double mastectomy that isn't needed for pressing reasons of physical health.

As a teen, I made careful and rational choices about my own future that involved rebelling against parental wishes to see my future solely as a mother and homemaker.

Getting into 5 seater cars with 8 other people all sitting on each others knees and in the boot etc then driving round country roads. We were lucky, a generation earlier people were drunk while doing this.

I think, YAS, it's not just that some teenagers do foolish, immature things. It's more that some of our absolutely firm convictions (be it Wicca or Christianity or some political persuasion) at that age don't carry forwards and many aren't a good basis for life-changing decisions.
And of course it doesn't apply to all teens. My DD was the most level headed youngster imaginable. The sort who'd look before she leaped, neither rash nor too timorous. Hopefully that's the majority.

I get that Errol ... This thread just makes me uncomfortable because I think that it stereotypes young people.

We have Gillick competence and that's all we need.

I think all teenage generations have a 'cause'. I was in the anti-Iraq war protest generation. It distracted us from the near-infectious anorexia of the year before. (Obviously anorexia isn't actually infectious).

We have Gillick competence and that's all we need.

That in conjunction with the Kiera Bell ruling re the higher bar on competency for life-changing decisions in circumstances where the youngster is unlikely to truly understand the long term implications.

Yes, the bar has changed because the world has changed.

I would not expect a young person (age 10 or similar) to be able to make binding decisions re future ability to orgasm or have (or not have) babies.

As for 'causes' - I was a socialist and a feminist. I am still both. I also knew that I loved learning and I am still doing this.

All of the above was against the wishes of adults who thought they knew better.

Sorry, Errol - just to be clear - I am agreeing with you (I think).

Yes I had my hair cut short and wanted to be known by a boy's name. I was a tomboy and was often mistaken for being a boy which I loved. I thank god every time I see some genderqueer nonsense that I was born at a more sensible time and had parents who allowed me to be who I was without question.

If I was a child now and had parents who felt pressured to "do the right thing" I could be on the path to seriously fucking my life up.

I wanted to sculpt my ears into elf like points

Walked out of college one day when I was 16, got a bus to a nearby city, hitched from said city to a road protest site, and within 2 weeks was in a relationship with a 29 yr old heroin addict.

I thought I Knew It All

I nearly joined the Army at 16. My parents convinced me that A levels first would be better. Then University. Then I failed the Medical and married a soldier instead.

Lots of things that put my life in danger but smaller things, quite linked to what your thread is getting at are:

*Feeling really insecure about the perfectly normal amount of hair on my arms so shaving it off, only for it to grow back fuller and thicker.

*Feeling horrified at having a singular chin hair so using hair removal cream to get rid, only for more to sprout. I now have a pretty embarrassing facial hair problem making me (in a very TINY way) thankful for lockdown and facemasks.

I wish I'd left my body alone. In hindsight both things were really not as bad as I built them up to be and my insecurity has made both "problems" significantly worse.

There's a reason we have the saying older and wiser. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone I often wonder how some people have made it to adulthood.

I thought I was so right about lots of things as a teenager and particularly when I was in my 20's. I looked down on older people thinking they knew nothing. I shudder to think how immature and ignorant I was then.

My point wasn't Wicca etc is bad or anything like that. It's that I had some pretty strongly held convictions at the time which I have looked back on and cringed. Some have stuck, like being a veggie, but thankfully some stopped when I grew up. (Belt skirts etc.)
It's interesting a lot of us made similar mistakes and some contagion instances.

Ditto lesbian friendship group all turned out to be straight bar one.
Ditto eating disorders.
Ditto drug addict older boyfriends.

My point is, these were right of passage things, easy to shrug off unless you are unlucky. The current trend however, sends you down a path of body modification and infertility. All of my friendship group are mothers now, despite denying this in earlier life.

It's a sad day when we look on anorexia and bulimia as the soft choice, but here we are.

The hair btw, is because I have pink toned skin which looks awful red. Took me give years of thinking I looked so cool to realise I looked like a tomato and not Ariel.

@OldCrone

In the end the boss found out and I got sacked.

So as a teenager you got the blame for being taken advantage of by an older man?

Yep, of course this was the 90's

Did many stupid things. Such as:

Arriving for a university interview early in a town I’d never been to before. Getting chatted up by some random guy at the station and then going back to his flat and smoking a joint with him before leaving to go for the interview!

Nothing bad happened, but shit!

Also a Wiccan

Dyed my hair every colour under the sun, had tattoos of random shit.

Drank to excess and did silly things like walking 4 miles home at 4am over unlit fields

Thought that I knew exactly what my life plan would be and how it would all work out

Spent loads of money on credit and got myself in financial trouble

Used my student loan to work my way through the cocktail menu every night for a few weeks then scraped by with no money for the rest of the term.

I'm very grateful that the internet didn't feature in my young years. My regrettable deeds and haircuts are largely confined to memory.

Changed my name by deed poll at 18. There was nothing really wrong with my name, but I felt self-conscious about it and associated it with a poor image of myself. I couldn't imagine a future romantic partner calling me by it. Changed it back a few years later and have felt completely embarrassed by the whole episode ever since. Unfortunately it lives on, on various contemporary documents. I now have no problem with my given name whatsoever, in fact I'm very pleased to have it. I was silly to think a deed poll would magically counteract the fact that this was my actual name that I'd been known by all my life and always would be my given name. The issues were entirely about self-image and immaturity.

I often think about that when I read about teens "becoming their authentic self".

Also, despite having been a slim and attractive girl, I managed to develop all sorts of specific neuroses about my looks, would spend hours tackling these imperfections, and talked about cosmetic surgery like it was nothing. Again, I felt this would all bring me closer to "who I was meant to be".

I thought of that when I read a Mr Menno article yesterday, in which he recounts a transitioning (M to F) friend talking about facial feminisation surgery and saying sadly "I just want to be prettier".

I am now perfectly happy with my looks. Well, I wouldn't mind losing 5 or 10 kilos, but at the moment I'm prioritising eating cake and not wearing skintight skimpy clothing as I used to.

I believed a relationship with a man would make me happy.

What an idiot I was back then

Oh go's I don't want to even go back there in my head! I pray daily my daughter isn't as stupid and reckless as I was.

I remember mum marching me to a plastic surgeon at 15 as I was begging to have a nose job. There is nothing wrong with it. Luckily the surgeon told me how ridiculous I was.

I also wanted my ears pinned back... that never happened either. I'm very glad now!