Book Review: Rose

Title: Rose

Author: Jazalyn

Date: 2020

Publisher: Jazalyn

Length: e-book unpaginated

Quote: "Everything hurts / But when I'm taller / I feel like a Goddess / And I need love / To be well."

The Rose, or the "I" speaker, or the Sleeping Beauty, in all of these poems is a girl. Not a young woman, a growing girl. That's what you'll love if you want to remember being a girl or understand a teenaged girl you know. 

These poems capture the emotional roller coaster of adolescent girlhood, HSP style, with a frankness that has few if any precedents. For HSPs it's not all about weighing and measuring and trying to enhance their eyelashes. It's about whether, in a society that obsessively pokes and sniffs at our private parts and feelings, we want any engagement with other people at all. We do, of course, but we do need to be able to spend lots of time alone and be very selective about whom we talk or listen to. Every rose puts out some good sharp thorns before it blooms.

What's not to love? Being adolescent is something we often want to sentimentalize in memory. We want to remember the hormone highs--the giggle-fests, the days of crazy teenaged energy and record-setting achievements, the joy of contemplating Nature, the moments of wholesome idealistic love, the first stirrings of spirituality. We want to forget the days of weariness, the frustration of not being legally adults yet, the days when friends hurt one another's feelings, the times when we didn't recognize the feeling of "enough" and made ourselves ill, the sheer misery of our first few major failures. Rose brings it all back, unfiltered. All those feelings that were not really bipolar disorder, just the way ordinary winning and losing feels to a raw half-grown brain, when deep down we know that we're not going to die and/or we don't want to die, but on the surface, where the emotions rage, we think we are or do. It was embarrassing to be this young. It might be embarrassing to remember it.

Everything seems so sweeping. Girls think they've loved and lost and will never love again and, if they can bear to mention the specific event that made them feel that way, it turns out to be that a friend decided she'd outgrown one of those childhood pacts some of us made to resist teen exploitation. Yes, it does feel like a betrayal. She said she'd stand with you on this, and then--who cares if it was a treat from a visiting relative?--she went out and got a faddy haircut or a silly nail-art job. In this book Rose feels betrayed because her best friend's started kissing boys. This is a normal part of being a teenager, an adult has undoubtedly told her. But the feelings, the feelings, she wails. Emotions matter. She felt loved, she felt hated and rejected, she feels soooo huuurrrt, she will nevvvver love agaaaain...

Possibly one of the ways we hurt HSP teenagers is by handing out counselling aimed at extroverts. HSP teenagers badly need to get a grip on their emotional feelings, to learn to focus on the left-brain awareness of facts that they can, in most situations, use to change those feelings. 

"I feel bad. I feel depressed. I feel tired of everything."

"Why do you feel so tired?"

"I feel hurt. I feel rejected. Nobody liiikes me. The boy I've liked all week asked someone else to go to the game with him. I just want to lie down and die."

"Speaking of lying down, how many hours of sleep did you get last night?"

"Um....two."

"Why don't you just lie down and sleep, then? They're only going to watch a game. Likely they'll decide they don't really like each other, anyway. You will meet someone who likes you as much as you like him."

"Oh...okay." 

Then within 24 hours the hormone tide turns and Rose gets up early in the morning, runs five miles, and has a batch of bread in the oven before the family gather for breakfast. Learning to shift focus to the facts is the key to enjoying, more than suffering, all those feelings that are part of being a girl.

Too many of us try too hard to tell little extroverts to focus on those feelings, especially the ones that show vestiges of empathy, because empathy is all their wretched little brains ever seem to develop in the place of a conscience. Introverts, however, do have consciences, and when they pay too much attention to their feelings, their consciences become inflamed, and the anguish can be so great that they try to stop paying appropriate attention to their consciences. They desperately need the saving grace of a focus on facts. 

If Rose had hidden these explorations of adolescent emotionality away somewhere and then settled down, when she was thirty or forty or so, to write a real literary novel, she would have known how to fictionalize the facts and craft a better work of literature. Inevitably, though, that would have meant trimming back the feelings and writing a less painfully accurate study of adolescence, so it might be argued that literature would have lost as well as gained.

And, parents? Don't worry. A very small percentage of the Roses of this world are going to develop psychotic conditions. The vast majority will be just fine when they learn to think past their feelings and focus on something solid outside themselves. Given plenty of wholesome things to do and plenty of quiet time alone, Rose will probably be a stable, sensible, competent woman in another ten years or so. And she'll have more fun dating when she's old enough to enjoy it, because she's learned to say no before she starts saying yes. And she may marry late, but it will probably be for life. Rose only sounds more worrisome than her classmate who is buying popularity with Daddy's money and/or sex. Really, nine times out of ten, it's the other way round.