Being thirteen, as a general rule, is pretty embarrassing, just every day! I’m sure we’ve all made choices as 13-year-olds that are perplexing to us as adults, that sieze us with red-faced shame when we remember them — or maybe, on the flipside, if we we felt like our souls were about to depart our bodies at the time, we might be able to find a little more grace for our thirteen-year-old selves now. I hope that if you like, you’ll share your own in the comments!
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Here’s hoping that wherever you find yourself on the spectrum of self-confidence to mortification at this moment in time, that you can find space for yourself just to be today.
xoxo,
Nicole
thank you for bringing us into the circle of trust!
when i was thirteen my main friends were my teachers, especially the librarian. she and i ended up founding a club whose purpose was to make posters for the events of other clubs, solely so that all of the weirdo nerds who hung out in the library would have something to put on their extracurricular resume section! once a week we would sit in the library eating popcorn and occasionally using the die cut machine to make a poster for an event that was already being advertised. that librarian and i are still friends! we bond over being depressed disabled queers
There was a women custodian who got me a birthday gift in middle school, I had forgotten this…. oh my goooood.
I don’t have as clear a memory as you guys do, but definitely around the time I was 13 was when I went to middle school dances with my “friends” and then they told me they didn’t want me hanging around them at dances and I called my mom and told her I felt sick and never went to a middle school dance ever again.
This is obviously a cringe thing that happened TO me instead of me doing a cringey thing so I will add my notebook full of Kim Possible/Sr Senior Jr. fanfic that I SHOWED TO A WRITER FRIEND. Where she was kidnapped the whole time.
Thank you so much for sharing! OMG the memories! I can clearly remember my 13th birthday. I wanted to have my classmates over and have a dance party where we would be bop to Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Spice Girls in the Macarena! But none of that actually happened! One or 2 70 year old neighbors came over and talked to my dad the whole time! I still want to cry when I think about it!
Em, your story! Wowowow it’s like something written in a teen movie. I know it was years ago but I’m sorry that happened.
select fav things from being 13:
1. asking out the pretty blonde girl and her saying yes, having my first kiss with the pretty blonde girl
2. listening to the con for the first time and absolutely losing my mind about it
embarrassing ones:
1. just a lot of really cringe-worthy tumblr and instagram posting, bringing said tumblr and instagram posting into my every day life
2. telling everyone all about shakespeare camp and how cool it was
3. reading the bell jar and getting really scared about it but not being able to tell anybody why i was upset because i felt i should be old enough to read grown up books
Ugh okay so most embarrassing thing to happen to me when I was 13 was the guy I liked asked me out a week before my bat mitzvah. He then spent the whole party hanging out and slow dancing with my friend (which is forever immortalized in pictures of that night) while I had to make the rounds and talk to all the guests. He broke up with me a week later and told me that he’d only asked me out because he knew I liked him and he wanted to make me happy because it was my bat mitzvah.
In retrospect, I ALSO should have been very embarrassed about the time I – a white girl in a Hawaiian shirt thrown over a grey hoodie – dressed up as Eminem for Halloween and tried to rap. But I think at the time I thought I’d really nailed the costume.
High-five Vanessa fellow younger student, I turned 13 in fall semester of freshman year and boy did I ever have the social skills to go with it. (Thank goodness for the best friend I met that year, we’re still in touch 30+ years later.) In mandatory PE I hung out with three other girls because they would let me – in retrospect I think we all understood it was because I was the only one in class lower in the pecking order than they were, so my lonely self got some semblance of acceptance and they got someone to make feel small so they could feel bigger. The worst memory is of one asking me, artfully concerned, if I were pregnant. My 12/13-year-old Catholic Good Girl self understood that I was being called both fat and a slut and that both appearing fat at any time from any angle and giving anyone any cause to believe I might have had sex were reasons for searing shame.
Fuck bullies and the stupid standards they rode in on.
My life is so much better now than then! :)
these were all amazing. I just remembered that I must have been around 13 when I came out to my friends at school who told EVERYONE ELSE I was a lesbian. one guy who particularly pestered me about this was someone I assumed to be gay himself. Today, I obviously feel pity and solidarity for him but tbh I still remember the triumphant feeling when I told him “you know what? Freud says you’re probably gay yourself if you are homophobic, it’s called projection” (um okay?) and he jumped up and punched me in the face immediately. While I suffered physical injury, emotionally I felt like I had won. it must also have been the same year when (prior to coming out) a guy in my French class invited himself over to watch Life of Brian (my favourite movie at the time). I honestly was happy to have met another Monthy Python stan, and had no intention of anything sexual happening between us. That guy basically sat on my lap, ignoring my efforts to move away from him. That was the moment my parents came home from work, and when he left, they tried to have “the talk” with me and wanted to teach me how to have safer sex (with THAT GUY) which as a closeted lesbian with NO INTENTION of having heterosexual sex, was absolutely terrifying. Interestingly, the guy who was so interested in making out with me had come over to see me while being in a relationship with a girl I was absolutely in love with, so I felt a) horrible for being the reason this guy she loved broke up with her while having no interest in the guy himself b) pleased and relieved as him breaking up with her via text meant I could comfort, and, theoretically, woo her.