Forever Seventeen
How your teenage self never leaves you
This is You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. The next course is May 28th, 6PM GMT. A recording will be available for those who can’t make it on the night. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.
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I’d been complaining to my wife that I was lonely.
“Why don’t you come to my next work thing?” she asked.
“What is it?”
“A salon. It’s a night held for thinkers, political advisers, cultural players, people like that.”
“Oh.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun. You’ll enjoy it.”
My wife, Farrah, insists she’s as antisocial as I am. This is untrue. When we walk the dogs, she chats for ages with random dog-walkers about absolutely nothing. It’s hard to know what she gets out of these conversations, apart from voluminous information about all the village dogs, each of which she knows better than most of her blood relatives, including their life stories (“Rollo the retriever is a rescue from Romania”) and their often extensive medical histories.
Because of her job, Farrah socialises a lot. She was a glossy magazine editor, and still works with writers and creatives. For years, she’d never ask me to accompany her to work events. I’d never bring it up because I didn’t want to go to them. Also, if I did ask her why, she’d tell me one of those soft-control wife-lies to make it seem like it was all for my benefit, whereas in truth she was worried I’d embarrass her by knocking something over or spending the entire evening standing by myself staring out of a window.
And so it was that, a couple of weeks later, on a cold, clear Saturday night, we exited the tube and made our way to the most amazing flat I’d ever seen. It was a penthouse, right at the top of Battersea Power Station. There was spotlit modern art and immaculate designer furniture and unbroken views for miles up and down the Thames. It was incredible, like something out of Succession. “It’s like something out of Succession!” I said excitedly to Farrah, as we walked towards the table where caterers had laid out food, and then she gave me a look, so I stopped.
After putting some dinner on my plate, I hustled Farrah over to a safe spot by a free-standing bookshelf. Suddenly starving, I pushed the side of my fork into a piece of tomato flan. The fork chopped down with a sudden, incredible violence, sending the flan’s pointed end flying through the air, to land face-down on the white carpet. “Shit! Fuck!” Bending over, I picked the flan end up and tried to scratch the tomato stain out of the carpet with the toe of my shoe. Farrah said nothing. “But how do they expect you to eat it?” I hissed.
A man approached us. It was a few weeks after Putin had invaded Ukraine, and he was an expert in Russian politics. I began asking him questions, and he was fascinating. And then he kept talking and kept talking. Farrah made her excuses. And he kept talking and kept talking. And I kept asking questions! I didn’t know how to get out of it. I just kept on asking questions, and he kept on talking. We were stuck in a loop. Eventually, I said to him, “Sorry, I’m just going to put my plate down. I’ll be back in a sec.”
Back at the food table, a dashing man in his late twenties smiled at me. He was exquisitely tailored and his jacket collars were popped. “I work for Prince Charles,” he told me, without my having to ask.
“Amazing,” I said. “Wow. What’s that like?”
He smiled beatifically. “Oh I love it. It feels so great to work for a values-based organisation. How about you?”
“I’m a writer,” I said. “An author.”
“Written anything I might’ve heard of?”
“Um, no probably not,” I said, shrugging dismissively. “Most recently, this book about social status.”
He looked over his shoulder. At the other side of the room, Zeinab Badawi the newsreader was leaning against the back of a sofa, holding court. Someone in her group was smoking.
“Are they smoking over there?” he said. And then he departed at massive speed. Honestly, he couldn’t have got away from me any faster. He practically leapt over the sofa. It was completely humiliating, an unbelievable fuck you. Half an hour later, I noticed he’d collared Zeinab Badawi, whose crowd had dispersed. He was saying to her, “It feels so great to work for a values-based organisation.”
The entire night was a disaster. On the tube home, I said to Farrah, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why can’t I fit in, in places like that? I just can’t do it. Everyone’s just showing off to each other. That’s all they do! They’re so serious. They don’t have a laugh. They just talk about themselves as if they’re the most important people in the world. It’s all status, all the time.” I thought she might be angry and say I’d embarrassed her, but she looked sad and said, “I’m sorry they made you feel small.”
Two weeks later, I had another social event. A lunch had been arranged with six school friends, who I hadn’t seen for over twenty years. It was slightly awkward, when we first sat down, but an hour in I was rubbing tears of laughter from the corners of my eyes. I hadn’t felt such pure narcotic joy, in a social situation, for as long as I could remember. When had I learned that I was ‘antisocial’? Where had that come from? I hadn’t been at all antisocial at school, which had been like a perpetual soap opera, full of drama and idiocy and trouble and fun. Back then, I’d loved hanging out with these boys and girls, who were now middle aged mums and dads, and it turned out I loved hanging out with them still.
As lunch at the cheap Italian restaurant stretched long into the afternoon, I thought about my night at the salon. It wasn’t that I was antisocial, I realised. It was a language problem. I’d been a foreigner in that room. Most people at the salon had likely been privately educated. The reason I felt so relaxed with my old friends is that we were comprehensive school people. Between the ages of 12 and 18 we’d been socialised in a very particular environment of swearing and piss-taking, in which self-seriousness and showing off in social situations had been taboo. Nobody popped their collars at St Gregory’s. If any one of the people around that lunch table had been with me at the salon, we’d have stood in the corner all night sniggering. We hadn’t changed, not one of us. We might have been an author and a lawyer and an investment manager and an HR executive, but we were still the people we’d been in the 1990s, and it seemed to me we always would be. We were frozen in adolescence, forever seventeen.
The self is a story we start writing in adolescence. For the narrative psychologist Professor Dan McAdams, “beginning in our teenage years, we endeavour to understand our lives as grand narratives, reconstructing the past and imagining the future in such a way as to provide our lives with some semblance of purpose, unity and meaning.” This period is so important in the construction of our identity that memories of it dominate our minds forever.