Season 1, Episode 14 - Under Pressure

Original Airdate - February 24th, 2002

It’s time for finals and Sean is stressed. His brother, Tracker, tries to psych him up, but also has to mention that their mother is sober. She has been wanting to speak to Sean. Sean gets angry about the idea of going back to live with his parents.

The next day at school, he confirms plans to study with Emma for his last test, Media Immersion. Jimmy makes a comment about Sean finally making it to Grade 8, but Emma calms him down.

They swing by Sean’s house to grab some studying supplies and he doesn’t want to let Emma inside. She runs into Tracker, still tense from their Parents’ Day showdown, but Tracker softens. He tells her she’s a good influence on Sean, and lets slip that he got into some serious trouble last year.

While they study, Emma asks Sean for details. He got in a fight with a kid last year, and it got nasty. Sean hit the other kid so hard that he’s now deaf in one ear. But he doesn’t want to make those mistakes anymore. He promises he’s working on his anger, and Emma believes him. They do some cute studying and middle school flirting. Burnt popcorn! Oh no!!

The Media Immersion test is fancy and online. Sean runs out of time to complete it and is convinced he failed. He spirals. The next day, when Jimmy makes another comment, Sean shoves him. Coach Armstrong breaks it up, but Sean challenges Jimmy to a real fight after school. The Grade 8s all gossip about Sean, and Ashley makes it clear she will not support Jimmy in this fight. Jimmy tries to call it off with Sean, but when Sean brings up the basketball tryouts, Jimmy is ready to throw down.

Sean is late to his next class, and Mr. Simpson holds him back from lunch. He tries to get Sean to open up, but Sean is pretty despondent. He’s a failure. He always messes things up. Simpson gives him very solid advice — as long as Sean believes that story about himself, he will make it true. Simpson is proven right at the fight. Emma comes along, constantly trying to talk Jimmy and Sean out of it. After they start their tussle, she inserts herself to try to separate them. Sean shoves her to the ground. Scared, she runs away, and Sean flees the fight after.

The next day, Jimmy feels good about his victory, but Ashley is far from impressed. Simpson grabs Sean to tell him that he passed the test. Sure he didn’t finish, but he aced the rest. Sean feels extremely guilty. He finds Emma and sincerely apologizes, but it’s too late. Emma walks away from him.

Meanwhile, Spinner is stressed about a test of his own. Only his English final stands between him and high school, and Mrs. Kwan is back. Her husband is done with chemo and doing well. When another student comes down with the flu, Spinner develops a plan. Terri starts showing flu symptoms, so he spends a lot of time in her orbit and drinks from her cup.

Just before the English final, he runs up and down the hall to get his temperature up. Mrs. Kwan sends him to the nurse’s office. His internal temperature is normal, and Spinner tries to insist something is wrong. But when the nurse threatens to take his temperature rectally, he flees back to class.

Kwan confronts him. She knows Spinner is trying to get out of the test, but she isn’t going to give him detention. She wants to make a fresh start. She tells him that he’s smarter than he thinks, and gives him some confidence and good advice for dealing with his testing anxiety. Spinner leaves the test feeling great, for once.

He brags to Terri about his awesome weekend ahead, one Terri will spend doing a makeup exam. But then he starts sneezing. Looks like his plan to get sick worked after all.

I was very good at school. I retain information easily. Testing never stressed me out. It didn’t take that much effort for me to get consistently good grades. But for about a year and a half, I was borderline failing.

It was a pretty simple problem with a straightforward solution. I wasn’t doing any work. I could vibe my way through tests, but when you don’t turn in homework, don’t write papers, and don’t complete projects, your GPA really suffers. Who knew?

I loved the thematic link between the two storylines in this episode, and I liked that it was centered around academic performance. I think there’s a very accurate observation about teen boy life here. It’s very easy to start telling yourself a story about who you are. And it’s very easy for that story to end up in “bad at school.”

As I was entering my freshman year, I was really struggling to feel wanted. I hadn’t yet come out, but I was obviously very queer. I liked art and music and dance in a community with two acceptable brands of boy - jock and nerd. I was, like I mentioned, very good at school, and so I was often bored. I would disrupt class with teacher corrections or endless questions about a personal curiosity that wasn’t relevant to the topic at hand.

I think sometimes, the really smart kid is embraced by their teachers, but I was almost too annoying for them to do so. I don’t blame them for this. Teachers have a classroom of students to instruct and don’t have time for a neurodivergent kid’s special interests, especially at a time before we understood cognitive function like we do now. I couldn’t seem to find my place in a classroom like the other bright kids in my grade.

I didn’t feel at home socially. I didn’t feel at home in school. And I didn’t feel at home at home. My mother was the primary breadwinner for our family, and worked constantly. I was in a house with four kids, including a brother with diagnosed mental health struggles, a sister with a severe case of teen girl, and another sibling with the chaotic child version of undiagnosed autism.

That’s where the narrative started for me. I was the Good One. I could be left alone, and I would figure it out. I don’t need much care. Taking on this story gave me a sense of place and purpose in my family, but implanted a dark seed. It wasn’t just that I could be left alone, it’s that I would. And no one seemed to think that was a problem.

I felt isolated and I felt ignored. Success was expected of me, but not noticed or celebrated. It didn’t seem like there was any point to being good at school anymore. And so I just stopped.

A classic cry for attention, no? Well bad news for teen John, it didn’t work. I didn’t get more attention. I was still good enough at testing and in-class work that my parents didn’t quite notice the slip in my grades. My teachers thought it was laziness, not a personal struggle. I had no Mrs. Kwan or Mr. Simpson to give me a pep talk.

I was telling myself a story. No one appreciated my brain, in fact some people did not like it, and so there was no point using it. No one noticed that I wasn’t using it, so there was no point feeling bad about it. Sean thinks he will inevitably fuck up everything good in his life so he rushes to that failure. Spinner thinks he will fail all of his tests so he tries to sneak his way around them instead of studying.

Teen John, Sean, and Spinner were all doing versions of the same thing. We decided, or felt we’d been told, what kind of kid we are, and we became that kid. This is exceptionally easy for any child, but it’s especially easy for boys.

There’s the obvious reasons for this. Boys are not socialized to be emotional. We get very good at pretending to bury our big, hormonal teenaged feelings. We swallow things like embarrassment and fear and spit them out as anger, surliness, and comedy.

But I think there is, or at least was, an insidious sense that boys are simple. Due to years of failing to see girls as people, we’ve started to notice the deep, individualized struggles of teenage girlhood. And then we foolishly assume that those problems could never apply to a boy.

A lot of ink has been spilled recently about the dangers of social media for teenaged girls, but don’t consider that boys can feel envy, feel judged, and feel lacking from scrolling instagram, too. We continue to downplay the prevalence of eating disorders amongst boys, even as obsessive macro tracking becomes more mainstream and gym culture is embraced by younger kids.

I think this is why we’re finding ourselves on the back foot as the online radicalization of young men is increasingly frightening and relevant. We all forgot that teen boys have big feelings.

They’re just looking to understand themselves. We say boys are simple and so boys go looking for simple explanations. I must just be a failure. I must just not matter. And now the stories they tell themselves are darker. I must be a victim. I must need to fight back.

I remain grateful that I was never a teen girl. I don’t know how any girl manages to get through it. I am glad so many resources are now directed towards protecting girls from the complicated interiority and fucked up external pressures they face. I wish more of those resources were motivated by altruism and not a gross sense of ownership.

But I wish we had better for the boys too. I wish we all lived in the perfect tv world with resourced teachers who could see boys telling themselves bad stories and had the perfect pep talk to get them out of their own heads. Even in that world, it’s sometimes too little too late. Mrs. Kwan and Mr. Simpson aren’t going to be able to keep Sean and Spinner from some big mistakes. But at least they tried.

At a certain point, I realized I was only hurting myself and decided to make an effort in school again. I got good grades. I got a good scholarship. It all turned out okay for me. My motivations were spite and a desperation to escape. Would have been nice if I could have been motivated by someone believing in me.