Spent an overcast Sunday watching The Perks of Being a Wallflower with my kid.

My youngest picked up Stephen Chbosky’s novel at the library a while ago and just finished it this weekend. I’m thinking about my own adolescence as I watch the movie based on the book, produced in 2012. The book was written in 1999, and I remember reading it around the same time it was published when a colleague at NYPL recommended it to me.

Although I was about a decade older at the time, the themes of teenage social isolation and heartbreak, anxiety and angst and trying to find your place in the world spoke to me. Even as a twenty-something, far removed from those teenage years, the lack of confidence and pressure to conform to the popular kids’ idea of “normality” still haunted me.

Watching this movie is hard. Being an introverted kid, I lived in my head. I made up stories and futures for myself, thinking that someday I would be popular and pretty and wanted. While my experiences in high school didn’t match the dramatic arcs of the book and movie, I remember wanting to feel part of a group and fit in. No matter that I was uncomfortable in my skin and not able to express how alienated I felt from others, even my own friends.

The scenes with Charlie and his new tribe of misfit friends struck such a chord, even today, in middle age. I see my daughter wrestling with these same questions of identity, choice, and social pressure. I wish had answers for her – a magic solution to make it smoother and easier to get through these awkward adolescent years. From an adult vantage point it seems like I took to heart too much, felt too hard, the emotions always close to the surface. Maybe some things never change and you just learn to live with the discomfort – the alienation – the anxiety.

– K