Rekindling Rage:
Connecting with My Inner 17-year-old
I’m an older writer. This has its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, I have a wealth of experiences to draw on and a great network of colleagues who challenge and support me at all the right times. With major life decisions and childrearing behind me, I have more time to focus on my work.
But the downside is that I don’t have as much time ahead of me as I did when I was younger.
Being aware of limited years is very clarifying. Time has become very precious. However, rather than being a disadvantage, this has become my superpower. I’ve realized that whatever I decide to devote my time on must matter. What do I want to spend my precious hours on? Where do I want to focus my attention? What do I care about as a human being? Now. At this point in my life on the planet.
Surprisingly, these questions are connecting me with my 17-year-old self. As anyone who has been a teenager knows, the teen years are a vital, vibrant and sometimes terrifying time of your life. It is a time filled with questions as you begin to explore the boundaries of your family and glimpse what is beyond. And although it can be unsettling, exploring those questions is essential to your growth into adulthood.
I, too, am at a vital and vibrant stage of my life. I am exploring the boundaries of my existence beyond the centrality of parents and dependent children. It is, perhaps, less terrifying, but it is still fraught. It is an essential stage for my growth into old age. It is again a time of questioning the world around me. And just as they were in my teen years, those questions are often very unsettling.
As a teenager in the 1970s, I was enraged by the choices that I saw adults making. I was horrified that governments funded sanctioned murder in distant lands. I was disgusted by the rise of consumerism. Appalled by environmental degradation. Furious at institutionalized sexism. Sickened by the ravages of racism. I deplored what I was learning about colonialism.
Sound familiar? What enraged me in the 1970s, enrages teenagers in the 2020s and enrages me still today. I find I have come full circle, travelling from my adolescence when I had the freedom to question the status quo, to my senior years where I again have the freedom to question and demand social change.
I recognize myself and my generation in the activism of today’s youth. Their commitment is helping me to remember who I was. But I recognize that it is their time to speak. I wouldn’t dare encroach on their space. I am too far from contemporary culture and technology to be able to speak the language of 2023.
What I can do is connect my remembered teenage rage with what I am seeing contemporarily and write to the readers in 2023. I can create a path from the teenage activists of the past to brave hearts and minds of today’s readers. In that way, I can write in two time zones at once. Each sentence and scene is constructed in a past that finds its mirror image in the present.
I wrote Focus. Click. Wind. (Groundwood, 2023) because I wanted to say to today’s activists –– You are not alone! We are out there on your picket lines, signing your petitions, writing letters, helping to fund your causes. But the grey-haired lady in the back is no longer on the front lines. Those are your front lines. Still, I want you to know that there is a generation of activists who have your back. Who are there, cheering you on. Rekindling our rage.
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Text and images are courtesy of Amanda West Lewis and may not be used without express written consent.
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