As adults, we often look back and make fun of how out of proportion our existential angst and ennui were relative to our actual situations. But of course, by "often," I mean those who were lucky enough to make it through relatively unscathed and with relatively intact families. And I'm NOT just talking about those of us whose high school years predated cell phone cameras and social media, although that was another huge privilege. Even, maybe especially, when we objectively had it pretty good, nostalgia is the mental equivalent of novocaine, acting as a numbing agent that makes us forget how hard it was.
I doubt that Belén Dolores, the protagonist of Shut Up, This Is Serious by Carolina Ixta, will ever look back on her high school years with anything resembling nostalgia. She is a ball of depression and anger. Everyone keeps telling her she looks like her dad, who abandoned the family. Her mom is devastated, and to Belén, it seems like her mom might as well have vanished. Her grades have nosedived; she sees no point in the things she's asked to do by teachers who don't care about girls like her. Even her best friend seems to have abandoned her; Leti has her own troubles and is struggling with how to save herself. Belén describes feeling like a weight is on her chest, a pressure that she keeps trying to get rid of, mostly through bad relationship decisions but sometimes with reading.
She says, "The more I read, the more immersed I am in someone else's life, someone else's thoughts, someone else's problems. It's the easiest way to push down my own."
Since nostalgia doesn't cut it, I spent a while trying to find the right term to describe how Belén might look back on this time, and I don't think there is one in English. I found the Portuguese term saudade, which is something like "melancholic feelings about missing something from the past, with a sense of regret or dissatisfaction.” There's also the German ZAYN-zookt, which conveys a "deep, bittersweet longing for something undefined and unattainable." But I'm not convinced that those would work, either.
While things aren't great for Belén by the end, they're better and they're better because she started caring about herself again. So I hope maybe she'll eventually get to a really good point in her life and look back at all that she went through when she was young and realize that it was those experiences that helped make her the person she is, that they developed her sense of empathy for others as well as her belief in her ability to persevere and achieve while not taking herself too seriously.
Huh. Turns out Belén and I might have more in common than I thought. I'll keep rooting for us both.
