Teenage Whisperer

'Low self-esteem' is a label that gets slapped on me and my mates the whole damn time. It's like you workers have one of those old-school price-labelling machines with 'low self-esteem' labels and boy do you love using it. Yeah, there's truth in it, a whole load of truth but labelling me, right in front of my face really doesn't help. If you repeatedly say it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's just another thing for me to feel crap about. (more...)

For this week's post I'm not going to say much because the video below from User Voice says it so much better than I can. It is massively inspiring with some profound truths, not least that many YOT workers and social workers etc. put the cart before the horse and instead of trying to understand and help young offenders as people first, they jump in and try to stop them offending without knowing and understanding them, which will never work.

I am stuck together with sticky tape. Not your good quality Sellotape or Scotch Tape mind, the cheap stuff that only works some of the time. Put it this way, if I get caught in a shower I'm in big trouble.

So trying to get me to change my life or even little bits of my life is no easy ask. All the pieces interweave and 'inter-stick' and if you mess with one, you affect the other pieces. Plus if you rip a piece off I will have a big gaping hole, which can be a bit draughty and can have bad effects on my structural soundness. So I will obviously try to stuff the hole in whatever way I can to keep myself together.

So if you try to help me take away one of my pieces of tape, one of the parts of my life, be it membership of a gang, excessive drinking, drug use, violence, self-harm you have to think about what I will fill that draughty hole with. (more...)

I sit on my backside. I don’t want to go to school. I don’t want to work. I don’t want to talk to anyone. The world can just f*** off. I’m just fine as I am, doing what I do, which is, well… nothing.

Doing nothing, not trying anything, not talking to anyone except my mates really, is the best thing I can do for myself. You see, it’s safe. REAL safe.

I’m like a toddler. I have tantrums like a toddler; I swing from ecstatically excited to belligerently uncooperative depending on how the mood takes me. The crux of it is that just like a toddler I haven’t learned self-control. Yes I might be more complex than a toddler in many ways, but hold onto this base fact, it can offer many clues on how you should deal with me.

(more...)

You want me to change, right? Well just like you don’t try to get a baby to run before he can walk, you don’t try to get me to change until you’ve done the basics with me. And the absolute basic I have to ‘get’ before change is even a vague possibility, is that my life as I am currently living it is not ‘normal’. Most of what I have seen and experienced in my life should never be considered anywhere near that.

I am more than my past; more than the things that people have done to me, more than the things that I have done to others. Yet just as others find it hard to understand this, so do I.

I am invisible - to others, to myself. It doesn’t matter what I do or say, I remain invisible. My parents didn’t see me, my teachers didn’t see me, people walking down the street don’t see me and neither do the pigs; no-one sees me. They might have noticed me kicking-off, but they didn’t see me.

I like to hurt people, to lash out, to destroy. In fact, most people think I am a total shit. But you should know that my shit is only skin deep. It’s not really who I am. Problem is, even I forget that most of the time. The shit is so deep, so well stuck on that it almost becomes an integral part of me. It’s my second skin. But that’s not really how I want it to be.

Drug dealers deal drugs, prostitutes deal sex… well I deal in pissing people off, and especially you. My broken self doesn’t know why I’m doing it, but my lucid self can tell you now. I am testing you. I am applying the thumb screws and seeing if you’ll scream, seeing if you’ll run, seeing if you are a fully signed up member of the young people’s helpers club.