I'm always torn between wanting to tell my story to everyone and let them know exactly what is in my head or keeping it to myself. The problem is being outwardly unhappy and consistently so it pushes people away, no matter if they say they're always there to listen, there is only so much your best friends can listen to. On the other hand, to pretend that everything is fine is to poison yourself from the inside out; is to ignore who you are and lose yourself. Because sometimes people actually do feel that way. Sometimes your life feels like it is caving in on you. Sometimes people really do feel like they don't want to exist, like they just want to curl up in a ball, and go into that place between life and death. Saying "I don't want to exist" isn't saying "I want to go die". It's saying that "I wish that for the time being, I could go somewhere and not have to feel". I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and if you don't know what it's like to feel this way, then you have no place to judge anyone who does. So which is better? To have friends that think you are melodramatic, seeking attention, and pessimistic, or to drown in your own mind?
Being a teenager is vastly overrated. We all make mistakes, we are stubborn and we couldn't give two shits what our parents think, we hate school, we cause shit, we fight, we love, we cry, we give up on believing in a higher power. We're all fucked up and that's the truth, we all come from dysfunctional families, because no family is perfect; we say things that we don't mean, we yell, we scream, we get our hearts broken, we get drunk, we have sex. Grades don't mean a thing anymore, we live on quotes and music that describe our lives. Most importantly, we are tired. We are tired of waking up each morning and having to go to school where we see the people we hate or the people we love, we get tired of waiting for the text message that's not going to come and we get tired of pretending we're fine. But everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.
The film runs out here.
You'll be sick of feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place. 'Old shelters—television, magazines, movies—won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.
'You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again.
No sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
'Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
Everyone says that love hurts, but that's not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Everyone confuses these things with love, but in reality, love is the only thing in this world that covers up all the pain and makes everything feel wonderful again.
I've heard that it's possible to grow up - I've just never met anyone who's actually done it. Without parents to defy, we break the rules we make for ourselves. We throw tantrums when things don't go our way, we whisper secrets with our best friends in the dark, we look for comfort where we can find it, and we hope - against all logic, against all experience. Like children, we never give up hope...
At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody. So this thing, where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other, is usually a load of bull. So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to, and once we've chosen those people, we tend to stick close by. No matter how much we hurt them, the people that are still with you at the end of the day - those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need.
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