Sailor Kabeary

Anne Bartlett
When I asked Anne Bartlett what comes to her mind when she thinks of her adolescence
she said, “it was not a highlight of my life, although there were ups and downs of course”
(Bartlett). Anne is now forty-eight. She lived in Durango for all of her childhood until college.
She grew up loving the geography of Durango and that love brought her back to raise her kids in
durango. When she was in middle school and highschool she loved to mountain bike, write, and
play the piano. She attended a dance class in college and quickly fell in love with it. This
inspired her to pursue dance which is still a big part of her life. Things like dance, which she
found later in life became big pieces of her identity. Through Annes adolescence, she struggled
with depression and found it hard to feel understood by the people around her. Not feeling
understood is something that many adolescents struggle with and her story is something that
many people can relate to.
An example of Anne not feeling understood was her peer group in high school. She felt
like it was hard to navigate the social world because she never truly found her people here in
Durango. She said, “I had a group of friends and they were all nice people but I never really felt
like, oh ya these are my people” (Bartlett). Her relationship with her parents was mostly good,
she explains it as, “even though they were supportive in the ways they knew how to be they did
not really understand me.” She also said that “because I was depressed I was angry a lot and, in
an unpredictable way I had really strong emotions that my family did not deal well with”
(Bartlett). Her anger never helped anyone but when she felt like her family was not supporting
her in the ways she needed, she could not help but be angry.
Something Anne found out through her adolescence is that it is one thing to find your
identity but it is another thing to trust it. Throughout her later years of adolescence, she felt that
she had been misunderstood by her peers, family, and the world around her. Her parents put her
on antidepressants when she was 18, which she described as “numbing”. She spoke about how
on a scale of emotion she was always in the middle, she never felt extreme emotions of any kind
“but I guess it was better than feeling extremely sad all the time” (Bartlett). She felt like no one
knew what she needed or wanted and most of the opinions she was getting from the outside
world made her believe that something was wrong with her because she was depressed and not
happy. Something she had a hard time with was the fact that she felt like up until she was 29 she
was not able to “get a handle on being empowered to deal with my depression in a healthy way”
(Bartlett). From hearing her story I feel like deep down she knew herself but because she never
felt understood she could never trust her identity. This is something that many adolescents go
through and parents and peers have a huge influence on.
A contrasting example is her feeling understood with her first boyfriend and her teachers.
She was very awkward and shy around boys but when she got her first boyfriend junior year she
bumped heads with her dad a lot because he did not like the boy. She says she thinks of it as a
very good first relationship that lasted for about 2 years. She said, “he truly wanted to know who
I was and he appreciated me which allowed me to open up in a whole different way” (Bartlett).
An area she thrived in was academics. She was a committed student and had great relationships
with her teachers that she describes as her “primary validating relationships” (Bartlett). These are
two examples where she felt that she was truly understood in who she was, which felt reassuring.
 Anne spoke about how she did not feel that she found her authentic identity until her
twenties. One quote from the interview that encompasses the main lesson she learned during
adolescence is, “Learn who you are but also trust yourself and believe in yourself and know that
you are worthy of being happy” (Bartlett). Her feeling of being misunderstood had a lot to do
with her lacking this idea of worth. As an adolescent, I understand how it feels to have opinions
coming from the outside world that constantly confuse your understanding of yourself. Towards
the end of your adolescence, when you are in your early twenties, most people have a pretty
concrete identity that can grow and change but the base of it is solid. One of Anne’s biggest
points was that it is one thing to think you have found your identity but it is another thing to get
past all of the outside opinions and stick to the person you have found yourself to be. I am
currently in the early/middle part of my adolescence but I have already had experiences where I
feel like I have found something that I love but then get shut down by adults or peers around me.
Overall, adolescence is a very vulnerable part of somebody's life and yet during this time
we constantly have society's opinions crashing down on us which enables us to truly connect to
our identity. We need the perfect balance of freedom and support to feel empowered in ourselves
and make it through this treacherous time of adolescence.

Works Cited
Bartlett, Anne. Personal Interview. September 29 2019.