Dear Teen Me, From Sarah “JJ” Jones (Editorial Assistant Extraordinaire at St. Martin’s Press)

Dear Teen JJ:

It is only the gay and innocent and heartless who can fly. –J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

You sit on the back steps to Pike Auditorium on a warm, sunny, southern California afternoon. It’s E block, your 45 minutes of free time in an otherwise honors and AP-packed class schedule, and while you should be studying, your textbooks sit unopened in a backpack by your feet. Instead you contemplate a set of 7 handwritten letters, one for every day of the week, meticulously folded in a battered envelope postmarked from Virginia. They are from your boyfriend. You wonder if you can bring yourself to read them.

Looking back, there are moments in my adolescence that had a profound effect on my adult psyche, pearls of significance on the long strand of memory. This particular pearl, the one with the letters, will have far reaching consequences on the way you view Love and Romance, which until this moment were one and the same.

But you haven’t opened them, not yet. It isn’t as though you haven’t seen their like before; only last week you received a batch much like the one you’re holding in your hands right now, filled with pretty sentiments and declarations of adoration. Yet for reasons you don’t understand, you can’t bear the thought of reading these, even though they are the stuff of your childhood fantasies, exactly how you imagined good love letters ought to be.

As you unfold the first, a cold knot of dread and disgust forms in your stomach. It’s the sensation of innocence slipping between your fingers, you think, but perhaps that’s the 25-year-old me planting false feelings into a memory. Right now, you are 16 and I can’t remember what you really felt as you read these letters.

An English teacher once told you that any adult who fondly reminisces about their teenage years is either lying or misremembering the emotional truth of adolescence. He’s right, of course, but what he failed to tell you is that perspective alters what you can recall, changing the past to make sense of what is now.

But what is your now? Your now is this: you are 16, the age of Disney and fairytale princesses, of TV idols, of driver’s licenses and an ever-expanding map of independence. Your eyes are dark, your hair is unruly, your skin is troublesome, you are on the shorter side of average, and you have been fighting the “chubby” label ever since you were 10 years old. You drive the most Mom of Mom Cars, a 1993 forest green Toyota Camry sedan in a school parking lot full of new Volkswagen Jettas. You are a junior in an all-girls prep school and you have a charmed and privileged life.

That is your now. What is my now? I am 25, living in New York City, and obsessed with YA and the bildungsroman. The loss of innocence and the gaining of knowledge is a theme that has haunted me through my favourite books, my academic papers on Milton and Blake, and even into my professional life. It is the reason I return again and again to children’s fiction, seeking out that bittersweet moment when you realize you are growing up and leaving Never Never Land behind.

Because that is how I remember your now. I remember 16 as the year of my bildungsroman, the year I grew into a C-cup bra, the year of love letters, a secret boyfriend, lost virginity, an intensely inappropriate yet chaste infatuation, an uncomfortable awareness of the male gaze, of migraines, manic explosions, nervous breakdowns, and the first manifestations of a later-diagnosed bipolar disorder. 16 is the year I discovered the ability to crush someone’s heart to smithereens without remorse. 16 is the year two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the year my trust in older authority figures was broken.

But this is how I rearrange the past to make sense of the present. You know none of this, at least not yet. In many ways you are a child still, self-absorbed but self-aware, delighted by simple pleasures and upset by trivial matters. You paper the inside of your locker with pictures of Elijah Wood and Ewan McGregor, learn to read and write Tolkien’s Elvish languages, occasionally dress up as Sailor Moon, draw shoujo manga, play piano and sing like you think no one’s watching, but secretly hope they do.

When was the moment of your bildungsroman, your coming-of-age? Could it be isolated to specific events, when September 11th occurred, when your religion teacher violated your personal space, when the aforementioned English teacher called you “JJ” instead of “Sarah” for the first time? Or is it the culmination of incremental insight built over the years, the realization one morning that you are no longer a child?

It’s nearly the end of your free block and you still haven’t read your boyfriend’s letters. You slip them between the pages of your sketchbook, where they will lay forgotten until the day you are packing up to move to England for a semester, the semester you discover what love really means. Love isn’t composed of saccharine and flowery odes to your “shining, raven hair” and your “angelic face”. Love is coming home to find White-Harp holding a bouquet of yellow roses and a sign that reads “Friends make for the best lovers”. Love is green eyes, black hair, long lashes. Love is specificity, something the letters in your hand lack entirely.

You don’t know this now, but you suspect it. You will receive more letters, but you will never open them. They will collect in a shoebox in your closet, growing like your guilty conscience until one day, your boyfriend shows up at your door, telling you he has moved to California to be with you. You don’t know what to do. You have kept him secret from everyone, half-hoping that he will forget you and move on. But your naivete betrays you, so for one night, you let him think you are his.

You never see or talk to him again.

How bittersweet are the moments you grow up. Bitter for the loss of innocence and simplicity, but sweet for the gain of knowledge and experience. Without these letters, you would never know what love truly is.

And for that you will always be grateful.

–JJ

All children, except one, grow up. –J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

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S. Jae-Jones (called JJ) is an avid skydiver, an editorial assistant at St. Martin’s Press, and an aspiring writer. When not jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, she can be found devouring young adult fiction and playing with baby harp seals. Visit her website!

Tags: Macmillan, St. Martin's Press