things that each greaser struggles with:
these are mostly headcanons i came up with. also, this gets pretty angsty.
content warning: alcoholism, addiction, anxiety.
- maturity. he thinks everybody looks at him like the “dad” of the group instead of just another friend, and he loathes it. he misses whenever he was able to skip work to catch a movie at the drive-in or take ponyboy and sodapop up to the dingo for lunch.
- accidental intimidation. his build is very large and strong, which is good for his job and for when he’s actually trying to, well, intimidate people, but other than that it just makes him feel guilty for being so unapproachable.
- relationships. specifically, darry is very insecure in his relationship with pony. he especially hates it whenever pony dogs on him for forgetting things or accusing him of not caring.
- emotional intelligence. he knows he comes across as cold. and he hates it. he has lots of emotions and he doesn’t air them out in a healthy way, so he tries his best to cut all the emotions off altogether in hopes that the negativity will stop, but it just makes him feel even more insecure.
- social skills. in high school, it was all much easier for him, but now that he’s working full-time and running the household, he’s fallen majorly behind in the social scene. he never goes out to the drive-in or to the dingo, and at first it was because he was too busy, but now, even if he doesn’t have a shift, he’ll make up some excuse because he’s too nervous to go and have to talk to people again since he feels like he’s gonna mess up.
- identity. darry was just starting to feel comfortable in himself and in his role in the world right before his parents died, and when they did, he stopped trying to figure out what made him happy. it has made him insecure of the emotional stint that is centered around his ego and sense of self.
- smarts. it’s canon that he’s insecure about this.
- growing up. while everybody else moves on to new things and grows up, he feels like he’s stuck in the same place watching everybody else progress while he stays behind. this was especially true after sandy left, because marrying her was going to be this huge exciting step in his life and when she left, he didn’t have that fulfillment anymore.
- reassurance. he feels a constant need for approval, and he will take it wherever he can get it. there’s a sort of pride he gets whenever he sees a girl checking him out, but there’s a deeper feeling telling him that she’s gonna run away once she finds out about how ‘stupid’ he is.
- authority. soda has a really hard time talking to people who are in a position of power. he gets all nervous and his hands get sweaty and his face goes sheet white in panic. his charm and social skill is enough to satisfy a conversation with a person his age, but he feels silly trying to be confident in front of an adult. he feels like they look down on him and will laugh.
- fatherhood. he’s very insecure about having a family in the future. he feels like he never appreciated his dad’s skilled parenting while he could, and since then darry has been a sort of fatherly figure in the house, but it’s hard for soda to see it that way. he grew up for 16 years with darry as a big brother and for him to suddenly be forced into a father role is troubling for soda. because of this complicated dynamic between soda and fatherhood, he feels like he won’t be able to be the best father possible for his children.
- legs. he hates his legs. you will never see soda in a pair of shorts, not even when he’s swimming. he doesn’t like the way they’re shaped and thinks that they make the rest of his body look odd, so he wears loose jeans to hide them. he’s also embarrassed of being embarrassed about them, so nobody knows, not even steve.
- emotional intelligence. his lack of emotional intelligence is something he battles with a lot. he understands what people are feeling, but he has a hard time understanding why they feel that way. he says it’s because he’s too tuff to deal with emotions, but deep down he knows it’s because he was thrust into a traumatic childhood so early on that he never had time to build emotional bonds with people that would strengthen his empathy and understanding.
- his past, another canon take. he hates talking about it, even the good stuff, because when he thinks about new york all he can picture is 10 year old dallas watching a man being covered in a white sheet by the paramedics on the side of the road. he thinks about his friends from there and knows they’re all either locked up or dead, and it ruins any enjoyment he gets from reminiscing on the good times.
- health. he definitely has crohn’s or IBS or something else that makes his stomach hurt whenever he eats, and it embarrasses him to no end. he’s always anxious that his stomach is going to start hurting when he’s with the gang and is going to have to find some excuse to leave. he smokes so much while he’s out with them to keep from getting hungry until he gets back to buck’s place.
- his friendships. the shepherd gang is close-knit. then, the curtis’ are brothers, steve has known them forever, and two-bit is outgoing enough to make himself fit in to the group. johnny is the closest person dallas relates to, and it’s the friendship hes the most secure in.
- his smile. he knows smoking ruins his teeth, and he knows they’re crooked all over, and he knows that when he smiles his lips crack and stretch out.
- his appearance, canon insecurity. he looks young for his age, and when the gang found him in the lot after he was beaten by Socs, they all started treating him like he was young too. he didn’t think the scar on his face was tuff, it just reminded him of being attacked.
- his voice. this is less about how it sounds and more about him not being able to speak over the shouting at home. he hates yelling, and he won’t stand in to speak up for him cause he’s too afraid of being told to “stop yelling”.
- being average. johnny feels painfully average in everything he does. he’s tried to find a skill that he truly loves and wants to take time to be good at, but he always gets frustrated and quits before he can improve.
- romance. almost every aspect of it terrifies johnny. he doesn’t know what a healthy marriage looks like, what he does know was from Mr and Mrs Curtis, but seeing them die together warped his sense of love. he doesn’t understand why you would want to love somebody so much if you didn’t have to. he doesn’t like the “til death do us part” aspect of marriage, because it makes him feel trapped. he’s not afraid of commitment, he’s afraid that he will end up in a marriage like his parents’ and not be able to leave.
- alcoholism. he’s an alcoholic and he knows it, but he’s been stuck in the vicious cycle of addiction for such a long time that the only way he knows how to cope with the emotional baggage of addiction is to drink more.
- social awareness. as of now, he’s very self-aware and extremely skilled in reading a room, but he didn’t used to be. he used to crack jokes at the wrong time and get scolded for it, and it made him feel horrible. like he wasn’t able to experience all the same sad feelings as everybody else because they reacted differently to the sadness than he did. they wanted to process the sadness while he wanted to ignore it.
- being absent at home. he knows he spends the majority of time at the curtis house, and he also knows that his mother spends the majority of her time at work, which leaves his little sister at home alone. he has a good relationship with her, but he doesn’t like for her to see him drunk, and as his alcoholism progresses, that gets to be more and more often. he knows this, and it’s one of the main reasons he’s so insecure about his addiction, because she’s the one who let him know that it wasn’t a one-way street. his problem affected him and her.
- commitment. two-bit is young, but he feels old enough to know how relationships work. he saw his dad walk out on them, and he was never able to process how you could go from marrying someone to leaving and never looking back. at first, he thought that his dad was just a selfish jerk, but when he met johnny and saw that his parents were also married and simultaneously abusive, he convinced himself that all marriages were bound to end up that way. he believes that if the curtis’ lived longer, they would have eventually gotten bitter and tired of each other, because in his mind, that’s just what couples do.
- confidence. he has a lot of insecurities, and they’re shared pretty evenly between physical and non physical. he doesn’t like his body or his eyes. he doesn’t like how impulsive and dramatic he is.
- security. not in himself, but in life. he’s permanently on edge, feeling anxious about who’s going to be around the corner and what would happen if he got jumped and how many Socs he’d be able to fight off in case anything happened. his parents’ sudden deaths did not help this. he feels like life is constantly tossing him around, and he never feels completely safe.
- emotional outbursts. this isn’t exclusive to ponyboy, but he struggles with it the most. he hates getting upset with people, and he hates hurting other people’s feelings. when he’s feeling too many things, he starts to speak without a filter and gets mad at the littlest things, and he knows that it makes everybody around him feel bad.
- fitting in. in contrast to johnny’s insecurity, ponyboy wants nothing more than to fit in. he’s tired of being the only greaser in his classes, he’s tired of his isolated taste in movies and theatre, he’s tired of being a track star, and he’s tired of all the pressure put on him since he isn’t average.
- masculinity. his dad always enforces an unrealistic standard of being strong, independent, and logical. steve is inherently all of these things, but the pressure he feels to keep it up weighs him down.
- comparing himself to others. it started in middle school when he noticed all of the people liked sodapop more. from then on he couldn’t help but feel like soda was more attractive and charming, darry was stronger and smarter, two-bit was funnier and cooler, dallas was tougher and unbothered, johnny was more likeable and down-to-earth, and ponyboy was more creative and well spoken.
- addiction. there was a time in steve’s life where he was getting high every day. at first it was fun, but then he had to quit track because he wasn’t as athletic as he used to be. it ruined his health and motivation. he started working on cars more to keep himself busy, and it helped a lot, even got him a job.
- hyperindependence. steve’s biggest character flaw is that he can’t ask for help. whether it’s asking for help in school or asking for soda to hand him a tool in the garage, steve can’t bring himself to do ask. it makes him feel like he’s not good enough to do it on his own.
