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On the first Monday of the month, my good friend Monique has been hosting a live Q&A about her new book, The HOW.
This week, she read an excerpt about age of agency, and how something psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually significant happens around the age of 12 to 13. She explained that this is the age where the parts of the brain that can engage in critical thinking and self-reflection are more fully formed, and how traditions and cultures around the world have historically marked this transition from childhood into the next phase of growth and development.
She also talked about how we can start dismantling our defenses and make choices about how we feel internally starting at this age.
(NOTE: We remembered to record the meeting! If you missed the Q&A, we have included the one-hour recording as this week's video.)
The discussion has got me reflecting on something that happened for me during this age - something that seemed small at the time but had huge consequences for my social life as a teenager and beyond.
It all started at Girl Guide camp (as all good stories about nerdy goody-goody girls do!)
Looking through the consciousness lens, I can see why I loved Girl Guides so much. It was a place where my two favourite Adaptations (People-Pleasing/Compliance and Controlling Behaviours) were strongly rewarded and even celebrated.
In case you don't know yet, Adaptations are the spontaneous, unconscious protection strategies we developed when we were young in order to manage in our environments. In the book, Monique also talks about how we developed certain skills through these Adaptations, what I have affectionately been calling the "silver lining" or "golden nugget".
There were moments where the silver lining of my Adaptations shone through - where I settled into Authentic Cooperation and Inspired Action, and this was usually at camp where the pressures of getting badges and donning a perfectly ironed uniform were more relaxed and we could just be a group of girls having fun together without our immigrant parents and tight-knit cultural community's expectations bogging us down.
You see, our troop was started by a group of moms and dads from "back home" who took a lot of pride in the legacy of Lord and Lady Baden Powell and their vision for a global network of children who had shared values of good citizenship, resourcefulness, team-work, and outdoor skills. Our parents took Guiding and Scouting seriously, especially my mom's family who prided themselves on the travel and leadership opportunities that Guiding and Scouting afforded them.
So, back to the story - Girl Guide camp when I was 12.
This was our first co-ed camp, where our cabin was for the girls and our brother scouting troop was in the cabin next door.
I remember our spacious cabin having three areas of bunk beds, one for my little group of four friends, one for the large group of girls younger than us, and one for the Curly Girls. They were a group of girls a year older than our group, and we now called them the Curly Girls because they had all got perms over the summer.
We wanted to be just like them - pretty, funny, athletic, well-loved, resourceful, smart, and kind.
Our group, though only a year younger, was still slightly too immature to understand the effort that went in to the fabulousness of the Curly Girls.
And this co-ed camp was the moment where we got to look behind the curtain.
Mostly, it was a sneak peek into the world of supplies.
They revealed boxes and brushes and palettes and creams and salves and sprays. Somehow they had coordinated it so all their beauty supplies were distributed between them - someone brought mascara and someone brought an eye-lash curler and someone else brought the eyeshadow and there was an eye-liner being passed around and someone else had a diffuser for the blow-dyer that someone else had brought.
Everything had fit innocuously into their camping backpacks, and as soon as the leaders left us alone, they unpacked and lined up their beauty items in their area of the cabin.
When I saw the display, I was aghast.
First of all, to my 12 year-old, rule-following mind, I was in big trouble even looking at all this contraband.
Hair dryers (and anything else that needed to be plugged in) were not allowed and makeup was definitely off limits! If it wasn't on the packing list, we weren't allowed to bring it - simple.
I could feel my heart palpitating as I considered what might happen to me, to all of us, if the leaders walked in on the Curly Girls getting all dressed up for the first time ever at camp.
Until now, we had been a group of girls that went away for a weekend from time to time and didn't think about what we looked like the whole time we were together.
But having boys in the cabin next door had changed all of that, seemingly overnight.
This camp was a turning point for me, because two of the girls in our group crossed the threshold. Instead of giggling with us about the silliness of bringing make-up and hair products to camp, they went over to the Curly Girls side of the cabin and watched with awe as they beautified themselves.
I don't remember what happened to the "contraband" or if the boys even noticed, but what I do recall is that my relationship with one of those girls, my best friend until then, completely changed after that camp. She would avoid me in group gatherings and she no longer invited me to sleepovers. She had crossed a bridge that was invisible to me, and we would never find our way back to each other.
Due to my strict mom, my focus on school, and my deep desire to please, I did not engage in the Curly Girls preoccupation with looks and boys until a few years later, but by then our worlds were so far apart and so much pain had already been caused by the freeze-out that I never recovered that childhood friendship.
From time to time when that old friend and I see each other, we will do a quick hello, but that deep connectedness we had as children is a whisper I haven't thought about until Monique's talk earlier this week.
For me, this camp was the first time I felt the incongruence of what I wanted and what my peers were drawn to.
And it felt terrible.
I spent the following years finding my people, recognizing that boys and bras were not the most important driver for me, and aligning myself to others who were driven for a future beyond high school love affairs and settling into a reliable job somewhere.
At the time, I didn't know I could have both kinds of friends, because the pain of feeling different, feeling left behind, was simply too great.
As I look back to that time in my life, I am beginning to see how my young brain and my limited understanding of the world made some things simply off-limits to me, things I am experimenting with and reclaiming now as a mother of a 12 year-old.
It warms my heart to know that my little one, very different than I was at that age, has the capacity to listen internally and be more deliberate about what she tells herself and whose voices get into her head. I am grateful that I have this community of adults around me that are committed to remaining in alignment while parenting, grandparenting, and aunty/uncling. I am learning so much from my friends from all walks of life who have had childhoods so profoundly different than mine, and seeing how much we share despite our diverse histories.
I am recognizing that we can all have our own like and dislikes, our own strengths and weaknesses, our own priorities and worldviews, and it doesn't mean that friendships have to melt away because of them.
That 12 year-old within me is beginning to cross the threshold.
And for that, I am so so grateful.
As you reflect on your threshold moments, what are you starting to learn about yourself? How is the 12 year-old inside you understanding the world around them? Are you noticing you have choices and options, or do you feel stuck with following other people's plan for your life? Can you get yourself back into flow or is that pre-teen judgement and angst running the show?
And if you are a parent of a not-yet-adult, have you equipped your kid with the tools to return to alignment? If you want answers for your own inner 12 year-old or a real-life younger one who looks up to you, watch this week's video and get the book. It's a game-changer in how we see this age and beyond.
Yours in the No-More-A-Good-Girl-But-Also-Not-A-Curly-Girl's Club,
Dr. Saira
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