By Grace George ’17
Does it bother you that the awkward stage of tweens is slowly vanishing? I find it unfair (and rude, to be completely honest) that current middle schoolers do not compare to my awkwardness from grade six to eight. I remember being in seventh grade, train tracks on my teeth, neon orange Converse on my feet and the feeling that I was probably the coolest person in the whole world. Now I look back and cringe at every single picture.
Even in eighth grade, when the braces came off and my sister began picking out my clothes, I wasn’t nearly as fashion-forward as current tweens. Now, when I walk through the halls, I feel almost intimidated by freshmen. Then I remind myself that I’m almost 18 and I probably shouldn’t be jealous of someone five years younger than me. Unless they’re Grace Vanderwaal, of course.
With twitter, VSCO and Instagram, tweens adapt to how high schoolers are dressing and behave on social media, essentially avoiding being weird. They post pictures with their hands on their hips looking cute as heck. Meanwhile, pictures of me from ages 12 to 14 are so atrocious that I threw most of them out. And don’t get me started on the videos. Why my friends and I made a new video every single day on the mac photobooth is beyond me. They’re so bad that I actually feel a pang of nervousness in the middle of class, praying that no one will ever see them, but the tweens nowadays post videos and pictures of themselves daily and they don’t look half as awkward and ugly as I did.
The idea of middle school is that you can leave it all behind as a weird abyss of memories that you can’t remember and, frankly, would rather not. But, with social media and the slow evaporation of one’s quintessential “awkward stage,” middle school is now a place where sixth graders become trendy seventh graders. AND THAT IS SO NOT FAIR. If all of us had to go through being sticky and gross, then so does everyone after us.
No, I’m not bitter or angry about being weirder than the younger kids now, but I do think that everyone should experience a strange and uncomfortable time in their lives when they’re trying to figure out who they want to be. Although it seems that some type of gap in space and time has formed where one jumps from cute elementary schoolers to fashionable teens, essentially skipping the process of hitting puberty. While this feeling continues through high school, into college, and sometimes post college, there are pivotal early stages that one must experience in order to bloom from a once ugly sprout into an okay-looking flower.
