‘In my mind, her struggles were over. She was a dancer: she’d found her tribe. I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by colour, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities… In that huge game of musical chairs I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit.’
What is adolescence if not an attempt to find a tribe to belong to? What is loneliness if not realising that no one has kept a chair for you? While we’d like to imagine that children make friends on a whim, we know the truth is far more complicated. Even for pre-teens…
