If It's Not Too Much Trouble,
Let Yourself be a Middle Schooler
BY ANONYMOUS
If you haven’t seen Big Mouth, watch it. If you think you’re too old to laugh at the jokes, you’re not. If you feel as if middle school and its pubescent trials and tribulations is far behind you, you’re wrong. If you’re like me, middle school feels like a distant memory; but, if you’re also like me, then the hookup culture in college— particularly while trying to navigate your own sexuality— makes you feel like a middle schooler.
Big Mouth, a Netflix original series, depicts middle schoolers and their tween adventures. One character in particular, Andrew, related to me a little more than I would like for a cartoon 12-year-old with acne. Learning how to deal with his new influx of hormones, his awkward personality, and expressing his feelings for girls he likes, Andrew encapsulated my experience: what it is like to like girls for the first time. But for Andrew it’s endearing, even expected. He, and everyone around him, are in middle school creating common cluelessness. So here I am, clinging to my teenage years, feeling just like Andrew from Big Mouth. Perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps an alignment amidst Mercury’s retrograde, but this year— particularly this semester, I have found my friends and I diverting from the heteronormative-frat-basement expressions of our sexualities. Though I have known I am bisexual for the past few years, it has not been until this year that I have started seeing women on a less drunken-make-out basis. While in middle school, when my romantic endeavors were sustained on passed-notes, Gmail chat, and promises to slow dance at the next bar or bat mitzvah, in college Tinder’s role cannot be overstated. I speak for more than myself when I say that as a queer student in college, dating apps change everything. From “Oh they’re…” to “I had no idea!” to “Amazing,” these apps serve as the mutual friend between two sweaty-palmed 11-year-olds confirming that they both do indeed “like-like” one another. But even then, uncertainty remains. What do you do after someone says they do like you? Do you kiss them? Do you ask them out? What does going out even look like? And if you do go out do you kiss them goodbye— what if you get too nervous to even give a hug? With all of these questions jumping around in my mind, I turn to my friends. It is there that I find solidarity under the guise of knowledge and advice. While we may have knowledge of how to best kiss someone for 15 to 115 seconds in a poorly lit basement, we remain clueless when confronted with reading girls. All of the fallacies of girls being easier to understand if you are a girl reveal themselves as terribly wrong when trying to unpack whether each word, glance, act, reflected friendship or something more. But when this does pass, because indubitably it will, a new stage of middle schooler arises. Manifested by the “Puberty Monster” in Big Mouth, this stage holds the fears and thrills of actually being with a girl. For me, my puberty monster took the form of staying up wondering if I should have hugged her goodbye, reading previous XMag articles (see “How to Have Better Oral Sex”), and constantly asking “is this okay?” for something as simple as innocent as having my arm rest against hers at the movies. Even reminiscing I shudder at the angst evoked from questioning every minute action; angst which compiled the first-time things did not work out. I blamed my hesitancy, attributing the challenges everyone— regardless of their sexual orientation— faces while dating to my fear that I would do something wrong, and ultimately thinking that I did. So, almost exactly as I grieved my 6th grade crush asking out my best friend, I listened to music and let myself be sad. Though Frank Ocean rather than Taylor Swift and The Script coaxed me this time, I could not ignore the similarity in my feelings. While I now had to navigate the nuances of hook-up culture and overwhelming heteronormativity, my heartache, just like in middle school, was more about me than the other person. Although I did not have those obstacles then, I was learning how to express my feelings, learning what I wanted, and learning it is okay if things take time. There is a particular scene from Big Mouth where Andrew tries to ask his friend Missy out. Nervous, waiting outside her window, he sputters, “I wanted to ask you if it’s not too much of a bother currently, if perhaps you would be my girlfriend?” Watching his jittery, uncertain disposition, I realized I am a middle schooler. Overwhelmed by my own feelings, paralyzed at the prospect of encountering boobs, tripping over my words until they sound perfect, I’m learning. Yes, sometimes it’s annoying to analyze a glance while my friends are leaving parties with people. Yes, sometimes I wish I didn’t make fun of people I like as a warped defense mechanism. Yes, I do say a lot of “That’s what she said” jokes. But yes, I am learning. Yes, I am growing. And no, I’m not too old to feel like a middle schooler; in fact, I love it. |