I Started My Teen Life on Online School; I'm Entering Adult Life on It Too

There is a teenage life that most of us envision either consciously or unconsciously at some point during our growing years. This type of life isn't based on being "cool" or "perfect"; rather, it's based on continuity. The days all blend together and feel alive and unforgettable while you're experiencing them. You walk through hallways and they feel full of sound, yet comforting; you talk to people between lessons and you have friends who you've become friends with because you see each other in the same physical location long enough to establish a friendship. This style of life feels like you are "living" your life rather than "managing" it from a distance.

I have felt that this type of life has never been quite in sync with the real world; mainly, this is due to the fact that the timing of the world has always interfered at exactly the moment my version of life was starting. My first two major phases of life for instance, have been defined by global disharmony in different ways, and both times they have required me to develop a way to grow up around absence rather than around presence.

I started my teenage life in 2020, and then everything became silence and screens; now I am going to transition from being a young teenager to a young adult in another unstable time, but in a different way. It seems strange to me that my formative years did not have the defined markers to help me define myself. The absence of these markers has become a part of me as I understand who I am.

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2020: When Teen Life Started in Silence

When COVID-19 began, I was just stepping into secondary school, which is often described as one of the most socially formative stages of life. It is where people are supposed to learn not just academic content, but how to exist around other people in a more independent way. How to move through social spaces, how to build identity outside of childhood structures, how to slowly become a version of yourself that is shaped by interaction rather than instruction.

Instead, everything dissolved into a digital version of school that felt strangely weightless. Lessons happened through screens where cameras were often off, microphones muted, and presence itself became something optional rather than assumed. There was no physical rhythm to anchor the day. No walking between classrooms, no shared waiting outside doors, no accidental conversations that turn into familiarity over time. Everything became structured but disconnected, present but not fully experienced.

At first, there was a kind of surreal adaptation to it. A feeling that maybe this was temporary, maybe even strangely efficient. But over time, something more subtle set in. When you are removed from physical environments long enough, you stop noticing what is missing in real time. The absence does not feel like loss immediately. It feels like normality. And then, at some point later, you realise that entire layers of experience were never actually formed.

What is harder to explain is that this is not just about missing lessons or academic structure. It is about missing the unspoken learning that happens between people. How to enter a room without feeling like you are interrupting it. How to talk without overthinking every word. How to understand social pacing without constantly analysing it. These are not things that are explicitly taught, but they are absorbed through repetition, and repetition requires presence. I was present, but not in the same way.

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The Camera-Off Generation

It is quite odd to belong to a generation which has been trained to exist in spaces with limited visual acknowledgment of their presence. During the first time online, many times student's had their video turned off by default. This was not a function of any one drama but was the easiest way to allow students to feel like they were present without being in front of everyone. Their name appearing on a screen counted as their attendance without them being physically there.

Over time the way, we think about presence and being physically present start to change. You will start to think of being "there" as being there much differently than how you did when you first started to learn online. Being present without visual confirmation will become normal to you. You will no longer receive the social feedback of others around you that lets you know how you are coming across (glances, subtle reactions). All you will have is silence, a computer screen, and your own interpretation of your experience.

Even after we resumed attending school in-person, this pattern of being separate and distant from one another did not completely go away. When we returned to school, we were all wearing masks and keeping our distance from each other. This was a physical reminder of how we were kept apart; however, I still feel that reminder: it lives inside me as a feeling of being unobserved or invisible. I have an instinctual desire to remain slightly less visible than I used to do; however this has changed how I interact in rooms, with others (i.e., conversations), as well as my relationships, and my comfort level with being wholly abled to be seen or fully noticed by someone else.

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Friendships Built in Interrupted Time

How we make friends during this time isn’t always what we picture making them like. They are often made up of many separate pieces, rather than through uninterrupted daily contact and gradually building a base of friends through repeat interactions and familiarity; but rather this manifests more so than ever, in small bits. You spend several months of being very close and seeing each other every day and then you have to work through a significant distance for an extended period of time. Once you can once again start getting together as normal, there is a new disruption to get used to; during each of these phases, your friend will take a different shape, and never seem to settle down into one defined shape.

This will change how you connect with your friend emotionally. Quite often, you have to build the connection between the two of you again after you have completed your connection. You will have to relearn your friends’ tone of voice, jokes and mannerisms of interacting with others. Your friends will have to relearn the same things about you! Never before have you needed to work on building your friendships this hard or so consciously as you currently need to.

And yet, despite the interruptions, sometimes the friendships still exist. They just exist differently. Less linear, more layered. Built on moments rather than continuous presence. Sometimes that makes them feel more intentional, as if every interaction carries slightly more awareness of its own fragility. Nothing is guaranteed to continue uninterrupted, so everything feels a little more noticed while it is happening.

The Invisible Gap You Only Notice Later

Disruption is frequently discussed regarding academic ramifications, but more so, the enduring social and emotional gap is lacking terms to define. This gap is unmeasurable and undetectable on a timeline but shows itself more subtly and continuously than any other thing. The experience is going to create a brand-new level of conversation that's going to feel just a little faster than you're used to. Group dynamics will likely have already formed a rhythm of their own before you get there. You'll also feel an unexplainable awareness that others have passed through a particular version of experience to which you technically belong, but you don't have total association with it at this moment.

When we returned to school in person, the transition back to "normal" was not as seamless as I had anticipated. The transition would be more like having an experience that was a little late to the party and already had its own internal pulse. Groups of friends had already formed; social confidence had already developed via shared interactions and shared space; and I was still determining what my experience was going to look like based on all those prior experiences that had already occurred. No one intentionally excluded anyone; however, all experiences had a pace to them, which was part of the ongoing development.

As time passes you start to acclimatise to feeling that way. This does not mean you will fix being in that way, but will have learned to be able to navigate your own way. You will stop searching for symmetry in your experience and begin working with whatever level of involvement is available to you. Although the change may not be large it certainly will alter how you interpret the concept of belonging. Rather than arriving at a particular location you will gradually insert yourself into a space/time continuum.

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The Second Disruption: Entering Adulthood in Another Unsteady World

And like other events have done before, they leave behind the same level of discomfort as their predecessors as new events affect everything else similarly to the previous year. Although all of these events are not identical to 2020, they do have a continuous impact on the emotional atmosphere of everyday living.

One of these continuing events is the ongoing conflict in the Middle East as it affects my last year of high school. What myself and my peers assumed to be an abstract, distant conflict now coexists with everything else around us. Everyone you speak to has their own thoughts and opinions about it. The news cycle keeps giving us information about it. There is also an awareness that the same daily routines are continuing in an unending cycle, while another much more complicated reality is happening at another location on the planet. This creates a unique paradox to have parts of life feel both mundane and uncertain at the same time.

Since the beginning of March until the middle of April, we were all plunged back into that same repetitive loop of Miscrosoft Teams.

I recently realised that this feeling of absence is now deeper and also has an enhanced degree of fullness than has ever previously been experienced; my memories of that feeling of absence are thus now composed primarily of the last years of my life as opposed to any earlier periods. Because I did not have the physical presence of another person in the seat next to me during the last few months of this senior year experience, the experience in itself is much more fragmented rather than lived in real time.

In spite of this, it would be inaccurate to say that nobody is doing anything at this time. All of us are active in some way. There is no world-wide shutdown, so we can all still go out and visit friends. Still, while we may experience "doing", this can be interpreted as though there is no true value associated with it (at least while it is occurring). Therefore, you go to an event, engage in the event, continue with the event, and know that the event is not working in accordance with anticipated outcomes, whatever those may be for each individual. Therefore, the actual experience of the event is not an absence of existence, but there does not exist a form for that event at that point anyway.

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The Myth of the “Movie Experience”

While we are growing up, there is an not explicitly stated expectation that we will have a narrative experience – we should have a narrative construct to rely on both now and when looking back and reflecting upon that part of our lives. Emotional peaks, common social arcs, and large-event moments are expected to be present in real time as well as in retrospect. There is no literal belief attached to this expectation; rather, the feeling that growing up should have a narrative can be seen as a cultural norm that has been passed on through various forms of media, storytelling, and societal understanding of the experience of growing up.

However, when parts of childhood and adolescent life have been disrupted in some way, the ability to find this narrative becomes more difficult. While in some respects, experiences feel endless; when disrupted, these memories feel interrupted. Moments feel as though they never occurred in real time due to the interruption, but they may make sense later at a time of reflection, or possibly, not have a sense of meaning at all.

At this point, a deeper philosophical question arises. It is not necessarily one involving the concept of "regret," but whether or not the experiences of adolescence require us to experience the activity in real time in order to count as "legitimate" experiences or whether they can be viewed as experiences even if we experienced them partially, from a distance, or in a different context.

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Growing Up Without the Usual Markers

When formative years are marked by instability, time often takes on the form of a series of adjustments rather than a sequence of events. Instead of experiencing clean transitions into new stages, we experience shifts from one type of uncertainty to another. One stage represents an opportunity for adaptation followed by another opportunity for adaptation; we have an opportunity to develop a slightly different version of ourselves to help us get through each period of adaptation.

The result of this is that milestone events do still take place; however, the emotional clarity that accompanies these milestone events is less pronounced than what they should carry. There is less emotion attached to these milestones. They tend to feel more internalised, less ceremonially defined, and more like past experiences remembered than current experiences lived.

However, through this framework something more developed occurs. An ability to adjust regardless of whether the conditions are perfect or not. A familiarity with what happens after a situation has ended even if the situations haven't yet fully concluded. Not something to call resilience in the traditional sense; but rather, an understanding that the world does not always align to our expectations and that the accumulation of experience occurs whether it has been a complete engagement or not.

Learning to Be Present Again

After years of fragmented experience, presence itself starts to feel like something you have to actively relearn. Understanding how to be in a conversation without mentally stepping away from it will feel like an exercise in "un-doing". It is through those types of exercises that you will become more grounded in yourself in this type of environment; thus, creating full trust between you and your environment by allowing things to unfold naturally without needing to frame them in a temporary or unstable way; getting through conversation as it relates to staying in one shared space for a specific timeframe.

It takes time for this type of change to happen; however, because change is based on pattern recognition (via direct experience). If you learned as a child that the world around you will be in a constant state of flux, your instinct will tell you to always remain slightly outside of your experience in order to protect yourself. Therefore, you are always observing (first) the environment and then participating (second) in the experience as a way to be prepared for something changing when nothing has.

Over time those types of experiences, though not necessarily dramatic, will slowly begin to create the space for you to no longer operate with an anticipatory mentality of interruption (instead, you will experience life without having a mental checklist of what may or may not occur). When those types of experiences occur, it will feel as though you are returning to a place that has been missing from your life for an extended period of time.

Over time, the accumulation of small distances creates an expansion into the distance; allowing you to begin connecting to your external world and to the people within that space.

And over time, those small returns begin to accumulate.

What It Means to Grow Up Like This

If I take a step back and look at these past 6 years of my life, it appears there was a pattern over these years and not a grand narrative or progression, but rather the same repetitive experience of beginning something, losing continuity, and then adapting to a new version of "normal". Therefore, this form of growth appears less like a progression along a straight line, and more as the same repeated adjustment to differing conditions.

This type of growth is usually difficult for those who have had predictable versions of the same stages, to a certain extent, because from the outside, it seems that everything occurred exactly as it should have. Schools and the like, have had their existence measured by years passing and respective milestones arriving. However, the manner in which one has grown by means of these milestones, most probably will seem to the observer (outside of the experience), like cohesive experiences, whereas anything experienced internally will generally be perceived as having been less cohesive, more disrupted, and much less connected as an overall set of developmental benchmarks.

Regardless, there has emerged an entity from the experiences. Through disruption (rather than in spite of it), I have learned to become familiar with instability; to be comfortable with adapting to change; and to have a subtle understanding of how life does not always provide continuity for identity to evolve in a smooth or uninterrupted manner.

These experiences should not diminish the value of the experience; only serve as a unique experience, which cannot readily be translated into simple terms.

Because adulthood, when it arrives, does not feel like a single arrival point anyway. It feels more like a continuation of everything that came before it, including the interruptions, the absences, and the moments that never fully settled into place.

As I sit in my room this evening, and stare at my uniform that will be worn for only a few more weeks, and double check my alarm to wakeup for school tomorrow, I realise that maybe this is what growing up has been all along.

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