Auntie,
I have this overwhelming anxiety that I'm living my life entirely incorrectly. I am an all honors/AP student, and my grades are stellar. I am involved in multiple extracurricular activities and excel in all things academic. I'm into reading, and I love deep philosophical discussions. I don't stay out late or do drugs or have sex or get drunk. Whenever I hang out with my friends, which I rarely do because I can't relate to anyone and am incredibly socially awkward, I get called a stick in the mud and a killjoy. I don't talk much when I'm around my friends because I don't have anything to say. They have amazing, crazy stories of all of their adventures, which usually involve the aforementioned things that I don't partake in. Their lives sound so wild and interesting.
They call me a downer because I don't talk much, but I can't exactly follow up the tale of a friend's 4 AM drunken escapade with a conversation about how I stayed home alone and read A Farewell to Arms. My friends don't relate to me or understand me at all, but I genuinely like them, and they're nice people. They just make me question my entire way of life.
I have always been a fairly good child/student/citizen. Sure, I have academic accomplishments, but I don't have any stories to tell. I don't have any "life experiences." I am so torn between two life paths, and it's making me an anxious mess. Should I loosen up and live a little, or should I stick the the straight and narrow? I've tried talking to my parents, but they obviously don't want me messing up my future by doing anything risky. I just want to know if living a boring, uneventful life is going to feel empty when I look back on my youth and have nothing to say other than that I did well in school.
This is a good question, Sparkler—and to make sure I gave you the best possible advice, I sat down before writing this column and thought long and hard about all my most memorable moments from high school! And in addition to making myself ridiculously nostalgic for floral-printed slip dresses and the music of Veruca Salt, I also reached some very important conclusions about what makes for a fulfilling youth.
Which is to say, yes, my best memories of teenage-hood do involve a minor amount of illicit cigarette-smoking, backseat boy-fondling, and ill-advised consumption of wine coolers. But they mostly consist of things like exploratory kayaking through a local bog with my BFF, and playing truth-or-dare on the back of a field trip bus, and cliff-diving with cute dudes in the Catskill mountains, and aimlessly driving around on a summer night with three friends and a family pack of popsicles, and attending a midnight showing of the Blair Witch Project that scared everyone in attendance so badly that we all slept with our lights on for three straight days.
The point? Coming out of high school with stories to tell has nothing to do with risky and/or illegal activity, and everything to do with being interested in things, and engaged by your friendships, and able to step outside your comfort zone just enough to prevent yourself from becoming perpetually bored and perpetually boring. Because the truth is, a life that consists of nothing but solitary intellectual pursuit is just as one-dimensional, dull, and destructive to your happiness as a life that consists of nothing but shotgunning beers and contracting chlamydia.
Which is why you definitely, definitely need to shake things up.
Not because the straight-and-narrow is inherently unfulfilling, but because people who find it fulfilling don't walk around feeling unfulfilled. And since it's up to you to cultivate an existence that you, personally, consider to be worthwhile and interesting and good—and since you not only haven't done that, but instead feel that your life is so dull as to be unworthy of discussion—then something needs to change. Namely:
You need new friends. Not instead of the current ones, but in addition to them. When your core social group doesn't relate to or understand you at all, it's time to seek out some friends who do, because the best way to live life to the fullest is to have wonderful, like-minded people along for the ride. So look around during one of those many extracurricular activities you participate in, and see if you can't connect with a few fellow straight-edge intellectuals—people who, if you told them that you stayed home and read books all weekend, would respond by asking you for reading recommendations instead of calling you a killjoy.
And second, you need a new outlook. It's time to ditch your all-or-nothing, black-and-white, torn-between-two-life-paths attitude. Because believe it or not, you have more than two options here. Veering off the straight-and-narrow does not mean shooting your future in the face and embarking on an unhinged downward spiral of drunkenness, drug-doing, car thievery, and premature death in a drainage ditch. There's such a thing as balance, and even your hard-partying friends probably intersperse their debauchery with the occasional book, homework assignment, and family dinner.
Which brings me to this: maybe your friends are just jerks, but I also can't help wondering whether their problem isn't that you're a straight-edge square, but that you're a spectator in your own relationships. Because when you stay home and read instead of joining your social group, you're not just abstaining from drinking, drugs, and sex; you're abstaining from your friendships on a whole. You're on the sidelines when you could be participating. You're shutting down while everyone else opens up. And if the distance you keep also comes with a one-two punch of finger-wagging disapproval—if, for instance, you've let on even a little that you see your pals as risk-taking, delinquent dangermongers—then it's not hard to understand why they think you're a buzzkill.
So, whatever else happens, please do loosen up. And open up. And if you crave excitement, find some, and recognize that there's a whole lot of lovely middle ground between messing up your future and having some well-deserved wee-hour fun before jobs and responsibilities and alarm clocks start making it harder to come by! You can, and should, take advantage of the latter while you still can.
And if you are going to stay home alone and read, please consider something other than "A Farewell to Arms". Unless you're trying to depress yourself to death.
Have you found the happy medium between being good and going crazy? Tell us in the comments! And to get advice from Auntie, email her at advice@sparknotes.com.
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