Dee Snider - Teenage Survival Guide

Attention, parents; Mom, Dad, it doesn't take a lot of money to dress a kid coolly. A pair of jeans that fits right. A nice-looking shirt or blouse. While it may not seem like a big deal to you, it can mean the difference between your teenager going to school, fitting in and being happy or getting hassled and feeling miserable over that drab, old-fashioned skirt that looks as if it could have been worn around the turn of the century.

I never could make my parents understand how important my appearance was to me, that it was one of the few ways I could express my identity. When I was fifteen, just starting school I began to let my hair grow a bit—-halfway over the and getting curly in back. But my father was a cop and very conservative.

One day he said to me. "Get in the car” and drove me to the local barber. He barked the instructions: "Give him one of these," patting the top of his head. My father had a military-type crew cut, which could be considered in style today, but back in the era of hippies and long hair, I might as well have tattooed "D-O-R-K" on my forehead. So there I was, the second week of high school a spindly, zit-faced freshman with my head practically shaved. The humiliation was unbearable. Even the few friends I had laughed and called me "bean head." "Dick head” "Penis head." Neighbors complained, dogs growled, property values went down—well maybe not, but it seemed that way to me. I was in tears, and my father could not at all understand why. (I'm in tears a lot aren't I?)

"I'm ugly," I told him, "I'm tall and skinny, with zits. I am not popular." Truth be told even my hair wasn't such a redeeming feature—it was all messy and frizzy, and obviously it was not the solution to my problem relating to others. But in my estimation it was the only thing that provided me with a little self-esteem. My hair meant as much to me as Samsons did to him, and my father had stripped me of that dignity, the one thing that made me feel good about myself.

He stepped back and took a hard look at me. Not at the son whom he had always loved but at the weird-looking kid with the cracking voice and pimples. And he realized what he had done. After that he never made me cut my hair again. And I haven't. But there was another force plotting against me.

There is a scene in the hit remake of the movie The Fly in which scientist Seth Brundle, who has accidently jiggered his genes with those of an insect, peers into the mirror at the living horror he has become. He tugs off his fingernails, plucks out his teeth, observes strange new growths on his new fly face. His body is completely out of control.

I know how he felt.

When you are a teenager, the mirror's reflection can be painful. What unwelcome surprise has Mother Nature wrought today? The body and features you were growing comfortable with are suddenly undergoing rapid-fire transition. Sometimes she seems pretty sadistic, presenting you with that pimple on your forehead—which, you are convinced, can be seen by all living creatures within a fifty-mile radius and is not merely a blemish but the beginning of a horn. Just what you needed. Invariably this happens on the morning before a big date, a speech in front of the class or, best of all, yearbook-picture day. Even worse is coming home afterward and finding a fat, new zit. OhmiGod! How long has it been there? Who saw it? This had to be the day you asked that beautiful girl in English class for a date. No wonder she said no.

For girls, it is during the ages of nine to twelve, and boys, eleven to thirteen, that their bodies begin to mature, with the greatest amount of growth usually taking place at age twelve for females and fourteen for males. Unfortunately this growth process occurs in spurts. Figures, doesn't it? You get taller but often don't gain much weight, and your neck, arms and legs develop faster and disproportionately to the rest of your body, exploding out from your torso. You feel like a building under construction, only the workers have put in the top floor and the spiral staircases before finishing the foundation. To feed this storehouse of energy that is your body, you may find yourself needing more sleep or becoming ravenously hungry. Girls' caloric requirements increase 25 percent and then level off, while for boys it's an incredible 90 percent.

Other signs of physical maturity are coarser and oilier hair; facial hair, perspiration odor; the shifting of baby fat on girls; dandruff, which is flakes of dead scalp skin cells; dropping and cracking voices, the result of the sudden growth of the vocal cords; development of the sexual organs (which is covered in Chapter 3, on discovering your sexuality); and pimples and acne, which seem to identify you officially as a card-carrying teenager. Acne is the result of dead skin cells, bacteria and fatty acids clogging hair follicles, and the result of acne is usually unmerciful goofing from your less sympathetic peers: "Pizza face," "Vomit head; ,"He looks like he lost an acid fight," "His mother fed him with a slingshot." And those are your friends.

For a long time it was thought that eating too much sugar or chocolate caused acne, but dermatologists, or skin doctors, have discounted such theories in recent years. This is good news. You might still be a pizza face, but you'll be a happy one. However, acne can be further aggravated when the glands are activated by emotions such as tension. It is recommended that you keep your face, and body, spotlessly clean with a mild, medicated soap and use the over-the-counter face medicines available in any drugstore or supermarket. If your skin problem especially disturbs you, ask your parents if you can see a dermatologist, who may prescribe a stronger medication, such as high-octane gasoline and a match. (Just kidding.) Also, if you're a teenage boy with acne who has begun shaving—you know, picking off those few pathetic hairs wavering on your upper lip—you might want to consult with a doctor regarding any precautions, so as not to worsen the skin problem. You want to look clean-shaven, not as if you'd just performed a self-sacrifice.

It is natural to experience a great deal of body anxiety during this period. Boys may worry that they are scrawny and underdeveloped—especially since females, on the average, are slightly taller than males between the ages of twelve and fourteen, and are heavier between the ages of ten and fourteen. On the other hand, tall girls may fret that they are going to grow to an abnormal height and will have to reside permanently inside a missile silo somewhere in the Midwest. The good news is that in the race toward physical maturity, all participants finish relatively close, with girls reaching 98 percent of their adult height by age sixteen and boys by eighteen. The bad news is, your nose never stops growing. Really. I know.

Our society loves beauty, yet how many people are really naturally, perfectly beautiful? Very few. And people whom we think of as beautiful or handsome often look so good because they are carefully made up or photographed. Like it or not, we are influenced by other people's ideas about what's beautiful and what's not.

Taken to the extreme, a person's anxiety over his body can result in destructive behavior. Our society overemphasizes unrealistic physical standards, which we are bombarded with through newspaper, magazine and TV advertisements. Young girls are especially influenced by society's idea of an attractive figure. Dolls such as the popular and busty Barbie present physical ideals that are impossible to achieve, due to two little concepts: gravity and reality.

There seem to be fewer accepted physical stereotypes for men. Imagine: Three-hundred-plus-pound William "the Refrigerator" Perry of the football Chicago Bears is named one of the ten sexiest men in America by Playgirl magazine, whereas a woman nicknamed "the Fridge" would be asked to remain indoors or be deported to the Russian Olympic team.