Life Worth Living

You think you’ve come to a point in you’re life where, at eighteen or nineteen, you feel like you’re above all that teenage angst. This comes after the final, illuminating realization that all those rants, those raves, those angry self-righteous spheals were all the product of being fifteen. You go back and read all those beautifully worded, eloquent blog posts and you laugh a little, you cringe, and you think “thank god I’m not that stupid little girl anymore. I can’t believe she was ever me,” and you consider burning the evidence, or at least, destroying it with that clever ‘delete post’ button, but then you consider that twenty years down the road, you’ll probably need another laugh. So you walk away, shaking your head and glad to be rid of your teenage self.

And then you come to another point where you realise that in some ways, nothing has changed. You think you’re so old now, so learned, so above that, but really all you’ve done is move on from teenage angst to young-adult angst. You used to blog about how boys are stupid because they dont treat you right and how the world is stupid because it’s out to get you and the president is stupid and mom and dad are stupid because they just dont understand and everything, everything is stupid. Except you. You’re cool, because at the ripe old age of fifteen you already know all there is to know about life how the world works and of course you’re always right and of course you already know who you are, and that’s someone who is better than everyone else, and so everyone else can just go to hell.

This angst is different. This angst flows straight from the mind of someone who is still patting themself on the back for not being that girl anymore, someone who is growing into herself, trying to find out who she’s supposed to be. This is the angst of someone who doesn’t know if she’s doing it–life–right, and doesn’t know whether she’s missing out and whether or not she’ll find herself when she’s old and arthritic an aged lady who regretts not being more back when she was nineteen and young and nimble and spry.

This is someone who tries too hard to check everything she says for fear of repeating the dreaded teenage angst, for fear that her future self will one day read everything she writes and laugh at her. Someone who is so afraid to be fake that she can’t even be real, someone who is so afraid of being a hypocrite that she can’t say half the things she really wants to say. This is someone who is too afraid of a world she knows isn’t even looking that she checks the “private” button on 7 of every 10 posts she types up.

This is someone who wants so desperately to be a good person that she can respect herself for that she’s lost a little of herself along the way, who then alternately strives to be so true to herself like all the books and movies teach that she no longer likes who she is. This is someone who’s just trying to find the balance, trying to find herself in this pulsing, crashing, deafening sea of a world and trying to learn and grow and make it and experience it all at the same time and who sometimes wants it all to just stop so that she can breathe.

This is someone who is at the top of her game, who loves her life, who wants the now to never, ever end and yet can’t wait to get a move on the rest of it. This is someone who is utterly fascinated by everything she learns and can’t wait to go out into the world and apply it but who is so afraid of what’s out there that sometimes she just wants to hide under her covers and sleep it all away. This is someone truely believes she is beautiful and special and wonderful and different but realises that she is probably the same as everyone else thinking that they are beautiful, special, wonderful, different. This is someone who loves her friends and loves her family and then alternately hates them, all of them for making life so damn hard and then loves them again for making it so easy. This is someone who wants the world to look at her and then wants to cover her face and scream “no, dont look at me!”, someone who wants to shine but hasn’t yet figured out how.

This is someone who is standing on the precipice looking out and down at the rest of her life and who knows that it will be wonderful and that all she has to do is to spread her arms and jump, but who is so scared of the descent that she just wants someone to take her by the hand and lead her down, step by careful step, or at the very least to give her a push so that she falls, screaming all the way.

This is someone who sometimes finds herself wanting to skip down the street and sing at the top of her lungs but is afraid to at the same time, and so usually finds it an easier compromise to simply lift her head and strut.