The reading I chose was “So This Was Adolescence” by Annie Dillard. It is a dark, somewhat scary, story about a 16 year old girl in despair. She just didn’t know how to control all the emotions that comes with being an adolescent. It doesn’t appear that there was anything going on with her family or friends that would cause her to be so angry. She doesn’t write about being bullied, teased or abused. She writes about the anger, boredom, and helplessness that she felt just from being an adolescent.
Her anger really spoke to me. I can remember having similar feelings of anger when I was that age but not to this extent. She talks about when she was angry wanting to kill someone or bomb something. To take out her frustrations, she would literally whip her bed with a belt every day. I think a lot of teenagers have these intense emotions and don’t know how to handle them and this often leads to drug and alcohol use. Her outlet was a little bizarre but at least it seemed to have helped and wasn’t destructive to her or others.
She talks about how she would play the piano so loudly that she damaged the keys and strings. She banged on the steel-stringed guitar until she bled. She had to have it loud. I relate that to the blaring music I listened to as a teen. It gives me a headache now but at the time it was sort of mind numbing. The louder the music, the less you have to think about emotions, feelings and just life in general. While just listening to loud music might help some, I think making your own music would feel so much better. I can imagine how the pounding of the keys and the guitar strings could be very therapeutic.
I thought it was odd when she wrote “I got so excited I looked around wildly for aid; I didn’t know where I should go or what I should do with myself. People in books split wood”. I am really not sure what she meant by that. I can understand that when people get excited, they want to release that energy somehow. Often people do some sort of physical activity like running or exercising but I never thought about someone splitting wood for that reason and I cannot ever remember reading a book with that analogy in it.
This reading is not something I would typically read. I enjoy things a little more on the light side. This was depressing. I felt her helplessness and hopelessness. I think that is what a writer wants, for you to feel it not just read it. She accomplished that for me when she wrote, “Black hatred clogged my very blood. I couldn’t peep, I couldn’t wiggle or blink; my blood was too mad to flow”. I could feel her anger and despair.
