Child enters 85-year awkward phase
ESQUIMALT, BC—Kevin Alpers tured 12 only a few weeks ago, and his body is starting to show signs that he's starting to transition into adulthood. Although his voice is deeper and he's growing more body hair, Alpers is no longer a boy, but not yet a man, stuck in a strange in-between place in which his body won't do what his brain tells it to do, and he constantly says or does the wrong thing.
"I just feel, like, weird, a lot," Alpers says. "Yeah."
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Alpers is merely experiencing what so many others before him have experienced: an "awkward phase" that will only last a mere 75 to 85 years.
"Many of us will go through a period like this," explains Dr. Elizabeth Hanley, Alpers' pediatrician. "Kevin will feel awkward when he's in a large group of people, a small group of people, hanging out with his family, or completely alone in his bedroom."
"He's only going to be like this for another seven or eight decades, tops."
While ultimately temporary, the "awkward phase" is all-encompassing, as it's just as much a physical state as it is a social or mental one.
"Kevin was giving a speech in class the other day, and he swung his arm around too fast or something and he knocked the map off the wall," says his teacher, Marilyn Douglas. "Poor guy ran out of the classroom. He was just sweating so much."
After leaving the classroom, Alpers tripped on his own feet, fell into a wall, and got a bloody nose, all at the exact moment a female classmate he finds attractive happened to walk by. The young woman said hello, and Alpers responded in kind, his voice cracking.
It's rough going now, but Alpers and others like him will probably only encounter a situation like this one – in which he enters a room and immediately embarrasses himself with a lack of poise, confidence, and fine motor skills – another 4,000 to 5,000 times in his life, either at work, in a store, or at his sister's wedding next summer, where he's scheduled to deliver a toast.
"I'm confident that someday Kevin will learn how to express his emotions, and he'll grow into his body, and he won't be so gangly or uncomfortable literally all of the time," says Dr. Hanley. "He'll be in his 90s, and will have lost both all of his physical capabilities and large swaths of his memory, but at least that weird phase will be in the past."
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