puberty redux

I often forget things I don’t know.

Naked, slimy, and bloody, we’re all born entirely void of the information accumulated by humanity through the ages.

I understand this. Metacognition is a wonderful evolutionary gift. But memory is fickle, so I always forget what I don’t know.

Puberty put it into sharp focus. Deodorant was the catalytic agent.

It didn’t have to be the girl I had a crush on in eighth grade—the most gorgeous person I’d ever seen, with a mind-bending body—to tell me I smelled terrible to appreciate putting on a bit of deodorant every morning is a profitable venture.

I’d been ignorant of this well-worn knowledge for fifteen years until the moment it mattered most.

And there was that time one of my friends got a hold of a Penthouse magazine and brought it to the after-school basketball game. Naked girls posing for pictures was a novel experience. The tingly feelings I got looking at those pictures were even more novel.

Waking up to a wet bed and stiffness did not have to be the first time I learned about that thing people have been doing for, what, millions of years?

And all that’s barely touching the tip of an iceberg of knowledge I yet have to grasp fully.

Puberty redux put it into sharp relief. The Great Resignation was the ventilating agent.

Like the teen years, in middle age, your body changes in ways you wish it wouldn’t. Certainly a different experience, but similar principles.

For example, it’s hair loss on top of your head rather than bubbles of oily puss on your forehead. Instead of awkward growth vertically in select body parts, it’s awkward growth horizontally in select body parts. You spend hours waiting for the hair right above your upper lip to grow when you’re fifteen. When you’re forty-five, you spend agonizing minutes trying to trim the hair growing out of your nose and ears.

In your teens, your emotional outbursts and rejection of authority drive everyone crazy. In your early forties, they also drive everyone crazy.

That thing that happens in your teens, they call that puberty. The thing in your forties, they call a midlife crisis.

And if you’re smart, you wait for a virus to cause a global pandemic to turn that embarrassing phrase into something respectable like 'The Great Resignation.'

A truth: both transitions are thoroughly glorious.

I have vague memories of the transmutation out of puberty, yet I remember, clear as day, the crisp, enduring feeling that I unquestionably loved being 17 years old.

The experience was like driving a getaway car while being chased by the most dementedly destructive demons through a maniacally long tunnel and finally hitting that point where the path is clear, the sun is shining through the widening tunnel opening, and Shawshank Redemption.

Turning 46 has been precisely the same feeling.

And I genuinely hope I do not have to do it again when I’m 76, but I’m afraid I’ll forget what I don’t know.