I was watching a special on MTV this past weekend entitled True Life: I'm a High School Senior. It tracked the journey of several kids from two different schools through much of their final year of high school.
It was painful to watch.
You know how sometimes you hear that old theme song from your high school prom or look at some locked-in-time photographs of younger days and every memory of the time and place tumbles down upon you and swallows your self-esteem whole?
Okay, maybe you don't.
But I do.
Watching the program made me nauseous. There are feelings that one learns to compartmentalize over time. Traumas, sights, sounds, loves. The mind pushes them to a little room, because though these feelings have built your personality, they shouldn't necessarily ever see the light of day again. But when something triggers the latch on the door to that little room, all of the memories and feelings spill onto the floor like sand. You can't pick them up and put them away fast enough.
As the more astute members of the audience may have gathered, I had a somewhat awkward high school experience. I was neither popular nor unpopular. Neither known nor unknown. Not happy or sad. I was just so ordinary. And I knew it. Feeling ordinary is harder to accept than anything else. It has a certain hopelessness to it.
Why did everything seem like it was absolutely important then? Very nearly the day after I graduated, I came to the realization that none of it mattered. I became the person that I knew I could be. Much more outgoing. Happier. Extraordinary.
But then I see these kids going through the whirlwind. Caught up in it. The monumental, seemingly life-altering twists of fate that tear at you and make you wonder if the world is always going to be so unfair. I want to shake them and tell them that NONE OF IT MATTERS!!
But I guess it does matter. I guess we need that little room in our mind. I guess we need to pass through there to get to here.
I need to go throw up.
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