Enjoy the next entry!
Entry 30
With the passing of February, I have officially crossed the threshold to teenage-hood. I'm one of the last to reach that milestone, with just Fishlegs behind me, and now… I have no excuses left.
For Vikings, becoming a teenager basically equals becoming a young man or woman… but clearly something was missed in communication on my end.
Honestly, thirteen year old me feels the same as ten year old me. I guess I know more now than I did then, but otherwise… nothing has really changed. I'm maybe an inch taller than back then, but I'm still looking up to everyone else. Not to mention I have literally zero strength… this definitely isn't how I expected teenage me to turn out. All this has really done is worry me. I could excuse my small stature before because I was still a kid, but now… I feel like I've run out of time. I'm kind of starting to worry I'll never catch up…
It kind of reminds me of when I was seven or eight, and the other kids in my generation started getting their first growth spurts. That was when the twins began joining in Snotlout's bullying, and I remember coming home one day and asking my dad why I had to be so different. He sat me down by the fire, and said that I just had to be patient. He said he knew, deep down, I was stronger than any of them, and I just had to wait and see. Over the next couple years, when nothing happened, he would just tell me the same thing. But by the time I was eleven, he just kind of stopped mentioning it. I think the delay (if I'll even grow up at all) has been just as disheartening to him as it is to me. Somehow, he feels like he's failed me as a father… but in reality there's nothing he did. I'm just a disappointment, that's all…
But now, I'm almost expecting him, and maybe even Gobber, to try and make me more Vikingly more than ever just because I'm a teenager now. I guess I'll just have to see.
Until next time…
-H
I may be misremembering, but didn't old cultures, like, discard children born premature or with birth defects? I'm pretty sure I learned that at some point, lol.
Either way, I feel your pain, Hiccup (though I wasn't really made fun of for being smaller and did grow out of it by the end of middle school... yay for modern medical knowledge, lol)
