I'm not sure exactly why, but for some reason
teen angst struck me in sixth grade, about the same time I began
puberty. It seemed as if my
brain had completely shorted out. All of my friends suddenly became incredibly
irritating. I believed that my entire class hated and despised me, which I'm fairly certain wasn't the case. I viewed myself as an absolute
dork with a horrible
personality. My clothes were suddenly inadequite as I realized I was the only person in the class who still wore
sweat pants on a regular basis. Everything anyone said to me was like twisting the knife, so I
isolated myself and talked with others as little as possible. The
circuitry connecting my face to my
emotions apparently went off-line, because my parents continually bugged me about wearing a very
unpleasant expression and I honestly had no idea what they were talking about. There was a circus in my pants, to say the least. My teachers believed I was
clinically depressed and recommended me for psychiatric counseling. I tried to play
basketball on the school team in hopes that it would somehow fix the problem. Usually, I just ended up crying in the car after the game had ended, lamenting about my ineptitude at
sports while my mother tried to figure out what was wrong and somehow console me. The one thing I was fairly good at,
gymnastics, suddenly became a source of endless
frustration as I went through a growth spurt and lost the vast amount of my previously known tricks due to the accompanying uncoordination. Religious beliefs were rudely questioned by my new-found skepticism, and I always started arguments with the poor resident
priest who stopped in at religious class every once and awhile (something I really
regret, even if I don't agree with him).
To put it succinctly, it sucked. Luckily, I recovered in about a year and now I can deal with high school sans neural instability.
Yeah, this is a getting to know you node. But, I didn't think anyone had really listed any symptoms of it, so I went with my own experience. YMMV.