Many emotions such as anger, sadness and shame accompany the adolescence period. However, happiness remains rather faint among these feelings. Considering the distribution of emotions, we can also think of adolescence as a period of mourning.
I can say that it is a very complex and frightening period when I look at it from the eyes of an adolescent -my own adolescence. Just as a newborn baby gets used to the world, there are many social, mental and physical changes that need to be adapted during adolescence. While we are expected to be individuals socially, we must continue to remain children. On the one hand, we should embrace ourselves, be self-sufficient and confident, on the other hand, we should experience new relationships in the outside world by strengthening our peer relationships. We should also not forget that in this sensitive period, we are expected to choose the profession that we will embrace and love for life.
Many tasks in social, emotional, cognitive and psychological areas await us. There are many questions to be answered and many gaps to be filled. In this respect, it is a time of rebirth. But it is actually a first death. Even if we witness the death of living things - our animals or our loved ones - until adolescence, we are faced with a question that needs to be answered: Now that we have grown up, what's next? The reality of death is in front of us more vividly. While we mourn our lost, it is time to find the place of death and who we are.
So what to mourn?
Adolescence is often treated as a period of discovery and innovation. Although it seems like a period of gain with the development of sexuality and identity, it is also a period of loss. Childhood, the childlike body, the bond established with parents and the process of self-definition through this bond have ended. Adolescence is the process of saying goodbye to the end of childhood and accepting what adulthood brings. This period of sadness, which we are all familiar with, actually represents the process necessary for individualization and independence. And the most listened melancholic songs…
We can put the uneventfulness of the childlike body at the top of the list of the lost. The childlike body and child identity are left behind, and a painful second birth process has begun. The first period in which the baby begins to individualize by separating from the mother As such, we now have to go through a second separation-individuation process with the parents. However, the atmosphere that awaits us seems more difficult and chaotic than the first. It is not interesting that in such a process we are always concerned with our own world and ourselves; because in order to embrace ourselves and our changing world, we first need to know everything that has changed.
We all know very well those hours we spend in front of the mirror. The reason is that the body begins to change and winks at the adolescent. Bodily changes are not just the discovery of sexuality and sexual identity. We are now in a position to bring a living thing into the world. This situation brings a new topic to our agenda: the issue of death. By joining the caravan of adults, we begin to see clearly that we will begin to live the life we saw from our parents, or that we are slowly walking towards death as our grandfather once walked. With adolescence, the meaning of life has changed and we have entered the category of mortal.
From the moment we are born, we begin to take a step towards the end, but realizing this is puberty for most of us. Until adolescence, we live in a cyclical world, in familiar ways. We are used to seeing the same body in everyone's eyes, in photographs and in the mirror. However, when it comes to puberty, everything suddenly accelerates. The balance is disturbed. We realize that everything happens once and will never come back. For this reason, at the beginning of adolescence questions, "Who am I and what is the meaning of life?"
In order to cope with death anxiety, we try to find the meaning of life and our own place in this meaning. In this period when death is noticed and dealt with in depth, diaries and diaries become indispensable parts. These notebooks, in which we date and write notes, help us cope with our death anxiety, live our unique existence, and write our own history. At the same time, those pages allow us to mourn those who have left, and to make sense of the present and the past.
Adolescence is actually a beginning with this aspect. It is the beginning of our efforts to find the meaning of life and add meaning to life.
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