Go Find A Pine Cone

What message would your 14-year-old self want to hear in times of unknowns?

Some weeks, it’s really hard to know what to write. I look through photos in my phone, think back through replays of the days. What did I learn, notice, glean this week? This week was hard for various reasons, and during such a strange time, it becomes harder, even for me, someone who tries excessively to notice beauty, to see it. I stumble backwards looking for messages.

One beautiful thing I did this week was learn. I attended a training by a local organization, Boys to Men Tucson, this past weekend. One of my besties was co-leading it. The girl’s group that I’ve co-run for 4 years uses a similar, yet different, model as Boys to Men: circles for young folks to check in, share emotions, tell story, hold confidentiality, and listen. During this training, one of the practices we engaged with was visualization: imagine yourself as a teenager, and become 14-year-old you. What is a message you may have needed to hear? 

After sitting with our past selves for a few minutes- feeling the braces on my teeth again, the gawky height, the super tight clothes, the desire so big to be liked by everyone-I still wasn’t sure what message needed to be shared. We were then invited to pair up with a stranger and reflect together, 3 minutes each, on what came up. One of the participants and I made the awkward partner-eyebrow-raise? face across the room, and joined chairs.

I started, trusting that while I didn’t know what to say, a thread would weave itself, and it did. When I was younger, I began, it always felt like a waiting game. If I could just wait until X moment, then it would all make sense: When my braces came off, then I’d be beautiful. When I turned 18, then I’d finally be an adult. When I could drive, then I’d feel free. When I went to college, then I could go wild. When I could work, then I’d have enough money to do whatever I wanted. When I got married, then I’d finally understand love. When I became a parent, then I’d really get it…

Almost 14-year-old Kristen (thank you mom for keeping the memory boxes)

As I shared, I held with tenderness how spoon-fed many of these adolescent promises were. They are the rhetoric of persistent, invisible and visible systems at play: heteronormativity and patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism. So much of what I believed to be true I have learned to question over and over again. And yet, reconnecting to a younger me who truly believed all of those stories, I remembered how desperately I wanted to know what it would feel like to finally be in control—to be an adult, to have power. I wanted to know it would all be alright. That I’d made it, wherever it was.

I had to smile at, and with, my younger self in this exercise. SO much of becoming an adult is realizing there is never any sort of arrival- not with a job, a partner, a family, a home, becoming a parent. It seems to be that most of what being an adult is is the practice of becoming more and more comfortable in the perpetual discomfort. It is the continual sitting in the messiness that doesn’t just clean itself up. It is figuring out what to do next, especially when anything that feels solid, secure, safe falls apart.

This week at the park, Alia befriended a 3-year-old boy who had an electric bicycle. No joke, this kid was zooming across the field faster than an adult could run. Alia, of course, tried to run after him. He stopped, and she waddled up, trying to hug him. He didn’t realize what she was doing, so I helped her ask him if he wanted a hug. He said yes. She then proceeded to wrap her rolly polly arms around him so hard that he toppled off the bike, and they both fell into the grass, the bike falling on top of them. “Help, help!” He called out, asking me to get the bike off. Alia, still laying on her back in the grass with her arms around him, grinned wildly, pleased with her affection giving. They both stood up, picked off green pieces, and promptly ran off to gather some pine cones. 

This is the message then, this week, for my 14-year-old self: hug hard, fall down, get up, dust off, and find a pine cone. I don’t know if younger me would have believed adult me if that is what I told her was in store for our future. Pine cones. She wanted to believe in absolutes, in the promise of tomorrow as a secure present.

Oh dear one, I say to us both. I shake my head. I sigh and I smile, in that annoying way that adults do. I’ll be here with you in the grass, I promise, searching for the small beauties when everything topples over. Reach out your hand, and I’ll help you up. Now let’s go find some pine cones.

Photo by Justin Clark on Unsplash