why is it that adults refuse to take kids/teens seriously when we attempt anything resembling depth, style, or (god forbid) ambition in our expression?
like a teenager writes something with ornate language, leans into imagery, lets the sentences sprawl a little, reaches for something beautiful or complex, and suddenly it’s “pretentious.” it’s “trying too hard.” it’s (my personal favorite) “you’ll grow out of that phase.”
a phase of… what, exactly? caring about language?
because when an adult does the exact same thing—when the prose is lush, indulgent, unapologetically excessive—it becomes “lyrical.” it’s “rich.” it’s “a distinctive voice.” (the same qualities, mind you, reframed through the simple alchemy of age.)
and it’s not just about writing. it’s the broader assumption underpinning it: that young people cannot be sincere without being embarrassing, cannot be articulate without being artificial, cannot be thoughtful without it being dismissed as mimicry. as though any complexity we show must be borrowed (badly), rather than felt.
(which is such a strange position to take, considering that adolescence is, if anything, a period defined by intensity—of emotion, of perception, of trying to make sense of a world that insists on being contradictory. if anything, the “purple prose” makes more sense coming from us.)
there’s also this quiet policing of tone—this expectation that we should be self-aware to the point of self-erasure. that we must undercut our own seriousness. irony is acceptable. detachment is acceptable. but earnestness? earnestness is embarrassing (unless you’ve crossed whatever invisible threshold turns it into gravitas).
and it creates this weird double bind: if we write simply, we’re dismissed as immature. if we write elaborately, we’re dismissed as pretentious. the conclusion being that there is no correct way to speak—only a correct age at which speech begins to be granted legitimacy.
(which, conveniently, is always older than we currently are.)
i don’t think the issue is that young people “think too highly of themselves.” i think it’s that we are not expected to think of ourselves at all—not as thinkers, not as artists, not as people whose attempts might still be worth taking seriously on their own terms.
and maybe that’s the most frustrating part: not the criticism itself, but the preemptive nature of it.
like the conversation was never meant to include us in the first place.
