Collected Item: “Second Adolescence”
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Second Adolescence
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
Photo taken by me.
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
This photo is of my little brother, who is sixteen this year, as we were spending time together on the balcony of our house. This was out of sheer desperation in terms of getting out of the house, even though it is freezing outside at this time of year in the afternoons. For two months during lockdown my brother and I spent more time together than we probably have in the last three years combined, given that I am ten years older than him and have lived out of home up until last year our relationship was always a bit like ships passing in the night. In addition to that our relationship has always been vaguely parental due to the age difference (and possibly my own gendered conditioning to adopt a caregiver role), yet in this period I have had such a strange feeling of emotionally revisiting my adolescence due to the amount of time I am spending with my brother and cousin who is eighteen, which has been such a strange and disorienting experience. I feel like this has been such a pointed sensation for me as someone who doesn’t drive, and with public transport it is just bearable as I have some access to independent travel. But when I could no longer go anywhere at all without my mother driving me, I felt like my identity as a capable adult essentially crumbled overnight. There are elements to this that are positive, I feel like my brother understands me much better now and my relationship with my cousin borders more on the side of best friends than cousins in a way that would probably not have happened if I hadn’t been forced to put aside the cloak of adulthood which made me essentially relate to my cousin from a caregiver perspective.
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
HUM404
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Madeleine Rowe
Give this story a date.
2020-04-17