“… cause something is wrong in this world”: In 2016, I wrote this in my notebook, referring to the 2016 April Four-Day War. I look through the notebooks of my teenage years and wonder: almost all texts are impersonal, lacking the typical emotions of that age (maybe it sounds a bit stereotypical).
Memories from a Crisis Adolescence
In 2016, I was 17 years old when the April Four Day War took place. On my way home from school, I encountered a convoy of military vehicles carrying the body of a soldier only 2 years older than me. That year, I was graduating from school and was officially supposed to enter adult life, when my peers and I were burdened with the heavy responsibility of maintaining a state we did not fully understand. 17-18 year-old teenagers, who were supposed to have vivid and colorful dreams, took on a strange responsibility, which implied that all their steps should be conscious and “serve the interest of the state.”
I start to look back at my childhood, then my adolescence, trying to understand where the “mistake”, that the 17-year-old girl wrote about, began. I don’t know what the beginning is, but all my personal memories and thoughts about the state begin with the word “crisis.” From a young age, when I had no idea what the state was, that word was on my lips, the meaning of which I did not understand either, but I heard it regularly on TV. Even though I didn’t understand anything about that adult stuff, I directly suffered the consequences of crises in my country. One of the main consequences was the absence of my father from most of my life because our country was always in crisis, and he had to go to another country to support us financially.
The events of March 1, 2008, when thousands of people took to the streets to demand fair presidential elections, are well remembered in my childhood memory. Memories of those demonstrations are now playing in my head with the buzzing sound of a TV that manipulated the killing of 10 protesters. I remember how, copying the gestures of the adults in my family, I was excited and happy when the demonstrations stopped. I was so involved in all that I cut out a picture of the new president from one of the newspapers and pasted it in my school diary. To this day, I do not put up with that political short-sightedness of my 10-year-old self. Then, 10 years later, in 2018, I had to participate in the demonstrations (2018 Velvet Revolution) to fight against the usurped regime of the same president.
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When you are a teenager, you feel the world through a different, more sensitive prism. Your still fragile identity and being are undermined by every crisis and emergency. And when you are born and your identity is forming in a country that is in constant crises, from social to political to war, you are forming unevenly, like a plant with a small and shaky stem that is trying to stretch and twist in the direction of a small source of light in a dark room. The identity of many of us in Armenia is like that poor plant that, suffocating due to the lack of light in a dark corner, grows half-heartedly between successive crises.
I and many other people like me lived through a whole period of childhood and adolescence that was not about us, where very little space was allocated to our identity and being. We have lived a whole life where our existence was conditional, and fundamental is a whole package of crises that shaped us as individuals.
Coping with crises
Growing up and being formed in that dark reality, books were the main source of light for me. In them I tried to find answers to questions that did not let me live in peace. Those books awakened in me an ever-increasing desire to fight for justice, peace, equality. As a teenager, I thought I could change the world and people’s hearts. In that darkness, I discovered feminism, which helped me understand my identity, gave me the energy and mechanisms of struggle, and assured me that I am not a hopeless romantic in my struggle and in the things I undertake.
I have been involved in this struggle for several years now, working in the public sphere, being in direct contact with many teenage girls. With pain, I noticed that I see in them that 17 y/o girl, who did not accept the harsh reality in which she was not at fault but became the direct bearer of the consequences. My heart breaks just from the thought that the situation in our country is like a cycle, the same scenario is repeated continuously, and those who are not guilty always suffer. And now I see the pain-filled eyes of those girls, which, instead of shining with enthusiasm, are filled with the pain of losing their relatives, their home, their beloved village in the war of 2020, and with an ever-increasing anxiety about the shaky future.
At the last meeting with our teenage girls, we were discussing their concerns and guess what they were? They started talking about statehood, dangerous borders, security, unstable peace. Their ideas about the future were almost the same content. They mentioned that they are going to become such and such a specialist, because that is what the country needs. And when you asked, what are you really interested in, what is close to your heart, they gave completely different answers. Everything is impersonal for these girls, too. Their emotions, concerns, visions, everything revolves around the crises at hand. And is it possible to have something personal under such conditions? I do not think so.
I start making comparisons again: just as the texts of my teenage years were impersonal, so were their thoughts and concerns. “Why does this cycle keep repeating with the same plot and how to change its course?” I ask myself this question, feeling responsible for the feelings and thoughts of my younger sisters.
I ask them: “What are your needs and how can we help you as a feminist fund?” “Tell me how to help the state”, “Tell me what to do that will be helpful for Armenia”, are the main answers.
“But specifically for you, what should we do for your well-being?” I persistently continue. After this more specific question there is silence, which gives more eloquent information about the current situation.
“And what does it mean to be a teenager in these turbulent times?” I ask them, anxiously waiting for the answers, that I know will hurt a lot.
- “Many adults, both in school and in everyday life, expect us to be already mature people like them.”
- “I hope this will pass soon (referring to the teenage period), fewer things will be required of us.”
- “Perhaps I’ll say that my peers and I don’t have adolescence.”
- “What I’m living now I don’t think is adolescence.”
Evaluating the current situation in Armenia and the information you have, you understand that it is not possible to be a teenager in Armenia: here you grow up all at once, missing a very important stage of your life, which is of great importance in the formation of your identity. And this is a repeated circle. Same scenario, different generations.
Adolescence is indeed a critical period of life. “Everything happens in adolescence, that’s why we need to have our place and role, our own self” says one of the girls in our teenage group. This seemingly ordinary sentence sums up everything I tried to say in this text. Yes, everything in this world should be in its place.
“A teenager should have the opportunity to be a teenager”, I think, and I begin to imagine the scale of our future activities: how much work we still have to do and how much time and resources are needed for our teenagers to “do adolescence” normally.
Yelena Sargsyan
