Surviving My Teen Years in the 1970s

The image to the right is from "Dazed and Confused," a widely beloved film of high school in the mid-1970s.  Having been in high school in the mid-1970s, I find the film all-too realistic and therefore not all that funny.  I think the problem is that the film implies that being stupid and rebellious was some sort of achievement and without repercussions.  The film doesn't present the lives of people like my classmate who tried every way he could think of to be cool without success until he finally settled on his route to fame: taking more drugs than anyone else.  The end of that gambit was not funny.

I found high school both boring and frightening.  I was completely clueless about how to connect to young women, especially the ones I found attractive, but also put off by the continual stream of sexual harassment that the school tolerated.  Taking a strong interest in academics never seemed like a viable option for some reason.  I don't know if that was because that's the stage I was in or because so few adults or certainly students seemed all that interested in it.  I wasn't into drinking (partying), so that seemed to be a barrier.  Distance running ended up being my "thing," and gave me a small set of friends and certainly a strong sense of purpose.

It's interesting, though, now that I'm spending more time with the people I went to school with to find out how much I enjoy them, and it makes me wonder why I couldn't have been less rigid and frightened and judgmental as a teen and made more friends and gotten a better sense of what the world was like.  It felt like years to survive, not explore.