I suppose it could be argued that "all teenagers are crazy and angst-ridden" and I was certainly no exception! But I had my reasons...
Gibraltar, not far from where we lived
A few months before my 13th birthday, my mother and I — my parents having gone their separate ways a couple of years prior — uprooted from my native Denmark and moved to the south of Spain... where we were to live with the man I came to think of as my stepdad.
It was — to say the least — a rather strange experience. Although I was already accustomed to moving all over the place from the first 12 years of my life, this was different. Different, because there was a sense of permanence to it. Different, because there was absolutely nothing about it that felt like "home."
Spain of 1973 was the Spain of totalitarian dictator Francisco Franco, and although the signs of life under a dictatorship were gradually dissipating, it was still a stark contrast to highly liberal and permissive Denmark.
The back patio at my parents' place
Mind you, at 12 years of age I didn't care so much, although I was quickly indoctrinated into a system where it was wisest to carry your "papers" at all times, and there was a lingering undercurrent of reality that the Civil Police could arbitrarily "disappear you" if you were doing something they didn't think was cool.
But the above is just setting the scene. What really made this one of the strangest periods in my life was the fact that we had moved to what was largely a retirement area and the idea that we were "in Spain" was a bit of a misnomer in the sense that a fairly large population of non-Spanish nationals pretty much segregated themselves in a growing number of wealthy enclaves where English — and sometimes German and Swedish — was closer to the de-facto official language than Spanish.
It didn't take me long to notice the almost complete absence of children... for that matter, the almost complete absence of people under the age of about 40.
I went to school, of course. It was an English-language international school, serving some 25,000 households of expats... to give you an idea of just how few children there were, we had about 150 school aged kids from about a 50-mile stretch along the main coastal highway... and I was often the only one to get on the school bus from our "urbanization," with the next stop being two miles down the road.
In retrospect, I would call it a blessing that I happen to be a solid introvert, so having an "active social life" was not a do-or-die thing for me... but it was still weird that 99% of my social interactions were with retirement age people.
And sometimes it drove me a little crazy. Or — perhaps — it fed the fact that I was already a strange kid!
Anyway, it was not long before I realized that my best — and usually only — way to escape from my strange "gilded birdcage" was to take long hikes in the mountainous hinterland behind where we lived.
Of course, much of what was there was fenced farmland, but beyond a certain point, it gave way to Spanish forestry service land... but more often than not, I would simply follow the nearby riverbed towards the mountains, occasionally stopping here and there at deeper pools to try my hand at fishing, mostly catching a few barbel and eel.
Mostly, though, I got to be alone with nature and away from the strange artificial environment that was my daily life. These excursions became more and more important as the years moved by... when I was 15-16 and growing increasingly conscious of a feeling that my chance at having any semblance of "teenage years" as most kids experience them had — in essence — been stolen from me.
Sure, "all teenagers are depressed," and I certainly followed that pattern. It wasn't anything "dramatic," nor was it "attention seeking," I simply found myself at age 17, deciding that I really didn't want to go down the road of suicide, so instead I quietly resigned myself to just "mark time" until death would find me, in some natural way... even if that might take 50-60 years.
NOT a particularly healthy attitude, for a teenager with most of their years ahead of them...
Some 20 years later, I told that to my therapist during a session and we actually had to take a break because she started crying, unable to get past the idea of a 16-year old "quietly waiting to die."
But I found a measure of comfort in hiking those mountains. In winter, I would occasionally make it all the way up to the freeze levels and see patches of snow at 800m (2,600 feet) or so before it had been too long and I needed to head back home. I'd touch that snow and for a moment be reminded of my Scandinavian roots...
Of course, I was overly dramatic, and eventually "escaped" to college in the USA when I was 20, after my father had died a couple of years earlier.
All these years later, I still feel a deep sense of peace and almost relief to have mountains nearby...
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
How about you? Do you have any specific memories from our earlier life, or certain things that kept you grounded/anchored during turbulent times? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20220730 00:27 PDT
0617/1863
Wonderful account of your teenage years. Nature kept me sane as a teenager too, and still does, although it seems much harder to come by these days. There I am free to just be. Did going to college end all of that?
Very interesting look into you. Thank you.
Life under Franco - I have this notion that Franco was so long ago, but here I was just a bit older than you. A wake up call really. We lived under these conditions, our children playing alone or with relatives, producing papers to go to school or a restaurant, recently. And will do so again when they tell us to. Unless we don't.
Thanks for the kind words @owasco!
Yes, I did end up going to college. As it turned out, my (biological) dad passed away a month after my 18th birthday, meaning that I was considered "of age" in the legal sense... so I spent a little over two years dealing with an incredibly convoluted estate that was otherwise not all that valuable.
After that, I took about a six month "sabbatical" and then headed to college in Austin, Texas in January of my 20th year.
We humans are very adaptable... we may not like everything that comes along, but we adapt and deal with it.