Your Rebellion is Necessary

The pathologizing of rebellion in teenagers is one of the great harms we inflict upon our children. As the future shapers of our culture, there is a reason why so many cultures perform ritual initiations into adulthood. Rebellion, if given proper reverence, is the necessary confrontation with society that ensures our sustainability. Just as any relationship must allow for the tension of conflict to deepen our intimacy, so must our young people be invited to contribute their disagreements to our shared aliveness.

Artwork by Valistika Studio

This is the threshold in a young person’s life when the dynamic between elders and youngers reverses. No longer is the old one in the position to teach, but now must become the listener. After all these elders have imparted, personally and vicariously through culture, they now have the chance at hearing from the young ones how they’ve been doing.

It is here that the ache and rage of unbelonging is most needed. In the young person’s disagreements and willingness to talk back to injustice, a wild storehouse of creative energy lives and thrives. While other cultures treat this transition with enormous significance, we make a tragic mess of it, treating our young people as aberrant and and unruly, needing to be reformed and taught obedience. Instead of inviting the new adult into a seat of authority in our circle of belonging, asking them to galvanize our outdated structures, their passion is driven into shame and repression.

At any age, rebellion can make us feel ostracised from the group, turning us into the so-called black sheep of our family or community. But the black sheep are the artists, visionaries and healers of our culture, because they are the ones willing to call into question those places which feel stale, obsolete, or without integrity. The black sheep stirs up the good kind of trouble. Her very life is a confrontation with all that has been assumed as tradition. Her being different serves to bring the family or group to consciousness where it has been living too long in the dark. As the idiom implies, she is the wayward one in the flock. Her life’s destiny is to stand apart. But paradoxically, it’s only when she honours that apartness that she finally fits in.

The world needs your rebellion and the true song of your exile. In what has been banned from your life, you find a medicine to heal all that has been kept from our world. We must find the place within where things have been muted and give that a voice. Until those things are spoken, no truth can find its way forward. The world needs your unbelonging. It needs your disagreements, your exclusion, your ache to tear the false constructions down, to find the world behind this one.

Excerpt from Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Toko-pa Turner