''AGONIES" OF TEENAGE - SELF-ABSORBED HOPELESSNESS VS REAL LIFE PRAGMATISM
The life goes through many kind of circumstances, the ages decide how we take these in our life there are three main ages childhood, adolescence and old. Childhood and old has one similarity: both needs care and wants attention from the ones they love the most. However, the main dissimilarity between them is that old has got its experienced certification but childhood is beginning of this course.
Furthermore, all these ages have their importance in one's life, but, from my perspective, the most important of them is the age which comes between childhood and adolescence, teenage, as I consider it as being the period when people develope themselves as humans and decide which path they are going to follow in life.
A best-seller which had sold 1.9 million copies by November 1985 and which was included on BBC's list of the 100 most influential novels, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ is the first book in the Adrian Mole series of comedic fiction, written by Sue Townsend. Written in a diary style, the book focuses on the worries and regrets of a teenager named Adrian who believes himself to be an intellectual. It follows him through the year of 1981 and a bit of 1982, starting with his new year's resolutions. He writes bluntly about his parents' marital troubles and his own relationship with Pandora, a girl whom he describes as having beautiful "treacle hair":
"Pandora and I are in love! It is official! She told Claire Nelson, who told Nigel, who told me."
The way in which he presents all this events makes the book very funny and intriguing, capturing the readers' attention. Moreover, he describes his cringe-worthy poetry, his troubles at school, his acne problem, the Royal Wedding and his eighty-year old friend Bert, and other interesting aspects of a teenager's life, making us all relate to his feelings, problems, thoughts and dillemas.
Teenage is a journey of self-discovery, of personal developement and last but not least, of finding out what we want to become in life. It is a consistent fight between good and bad, between right or wrong, and this fight is a burden that our soul has to carry during our teenage years. When we are teenagers, we consider ourselves as being unique, special, one of a kind, but as we are forced to face reality, we start to struggle while trying to find who we really are. Such as Adrian who calls himself an intellectual, because he understood nearly every world a man in television said, we tend to life in an utopia where everything is perfect and we are the center of the world, but unfortunately the more our brain gets lost in the clouds, the more painful the fall to reality will be. Similarily to Adrian's case, who, after receiving a letter from BBC, although his poem is rejected, shows it to everyone and reads it multiple times, we are so desperate to prove ourselves and show the world that we are not ordinary human beings.
The most troublesome aspect of our life that we have to decide during our teenage years is our career. Speaking of Adrian, he decides to be a vet after he read Animal Farm and starts dreaming about being the best in this domain, and such as him, we come up with various options for our future, not knowing however what defines us and what we really want to achieve in our ephemeral existence.
Moreover, there are intense feelings that we discover during that period of our life, such as love, anger, dissapointment, feelings that devour us and makes us very confuse. The "first love" always occurs when we are little. We find that specific person who catches our attention and with whom we think we will spend the rest of our lives with. Of course, generally, we don't even have the chance to be with that person and we start thinking how to person will regret ignoring us when we will grow up. This is the time when we also learn about bullying, fake friends, such as Nigel, who dated Pandora even though he knew that Adrian liked her, and other dark shades of life.
Teenage years makes us understand the world, with its good and bad aspects. We realise that life is not perfect, not even mostly painted in pink, and extend our branches of perception in many other domains that we are not that informed about, voluntarily or involuntarily. For example, Adrian was forced to understand divorce because his parents were going trough that kind of experience, understand heartbreak because he was betrayed by his friend, understand disappointment because he was not always succesful, and that is normal, because only when we are teenagers we can make mistakes and learn from them in order to form ourselves as responsable humans, capable to face any obstacle that life throws on our path.
All in all, I loved the way in which the book outlined the difficulty of being a teenager with its good and bad parts, and how it is very difficult to become aware of the reality after getting used to being self-absorbed in your own childish perception about life, such as Adrian and most teenagers are. Thus, I compare this book to a mirror which reflects the flawless image of a typical teenager.