//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.
My parents and I clashed a lot when I was in high school. Things always felt kind of tense – a universal teenage experience with parents. I did the usual: I stayed up late talking to friends, I made tons of weekend plans instead of staying home with my parents, I talked back. I was also dating a girl, the unforgivable sin. Of course, dating wasn’t acceptable in my household. Forget permissible, dating wasn’t even a concept.
The largest fights I had with my parents, probably even to today, was regarding this girlfriend. It made our home fraught with tension. My parents would try to stress how inappropriate something like this was, especially at my age, and I’d deny something like that was even going on at all, all the while staying up late talking on the phone, and staying late at school to hang out.
Having a high school girlfriend helped me understand at-home chaos and stress in a way I never understood before. My parents were afraid of losing their child to something they couldn’t understand and control, and I was afraid getting caught doing something I knew I shouldn’t be doing (by their standards). This dissonance was crippling.
This, of course, is an extremely common experience for anyone coming from a traditional household. In my high school of mostly South Asian teenagers, “secret” relationships were commonplace. Everyone was disappointing their parents, one way or another.
Causing this household tension at that age, and witnessing first-hand how my actions affected my parents, disincentivized me from acting out in the future. When I went off to university, I was relatively tame. It felt like the rebellion was flushed out of my system. I just wasn’t excited by the notion of doing anything that felt wrong or unacceptable by the people who loved me. It wasn’t fun.
The same can be said for my peers who had their own Grand Rebellion earlier in life.
A Grand Rebellion is characterized an act, or a series of actions, in which the rebeller is fully aware of their delinquency. It’s a decision they are consciously making that has and will continue to have very material consequences for their life. Grand Rebellions are often kept secret from the rebeller’s close friends or loved ones out of self-preservation or a sense of shame, and are typically executed in one of the following three domains: relationships, careers, or hedonism to the point of self-destruction.
I think we all need a Grand Rebellion. We feel the rush, we feel the rewards, and after all is said and done, we mostly realize that the forbidden fruit is not so sweet. In fact, we realize there may have been a good reason to avoid it after all.
We all have friends who were insatiable partiers when they were younger, or dated a guy/girl of whom their parents would vehemently disapprove (i.e., outside their culture), or disavowed their parents’ wishes and went to theatre school instead of becoming an engineer. We all have friends with crazy stories that make you cock your head and say “You did what?”.
In university and beyond, we come across people who continue to act out. They feel constrained by rules and feel a childish thrill when engaging in risky behaviour. Often times, these folks never had a Grand Rebellion in which they came face-to-face with the very real-life consequences of rebelling. For them, it’s always felt like a game.
Although these adult offenders are rebelling, they never had their one life-altering hurrah. They’re not afraid of everything being snatched from them because of an error they’ve made. They lack a sense of ownership over the direction of their life. Life, for them, is still a series of tiny rebellions, hoping they don’t found out.
I’m still working through how and why, but it seems like having a Grand Rebellion is crucial for healthy development into adulthood. It provides a strong sense of maturity and responsibility. Those that have Rebelled deeply understand their actions have real-world consequences and they aren’t derailed by cheap thrills. They’re thrilled out. They’ve had their fun.
Now, they’re looking to build the life they’ve always wanted, one calculated decision at a time.
Rebelling,
Vandan
Vandan Jhaveri 