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Friday, August 24, 2012 "To be young is to be painfully, cripplingly insecure. Categorizing and sorting people as a botanist might a group of plants in a garden — something we’d never acknowledge is possible for ourselves — comes so easily as to go almost unnoticed. He is a this, she is a that. And yet, such an affinity for thinking we know perfect strangers (and wondering, always wondering, what they might be thinking of us) reveals only a deeper narcissism. We pretend that the worst fate would be for people to hate us when our back is turned, but the real pain — the one made all the more unbearable by how true it actually is — is not being thought of at all. And perhaps to make up for this lack of attention that we get from the world around us, to compensate for every stranger we pass in the street being a full human being with a real life that factors us in not at all, we go right back to staring directly into our beautiful, perfect navels. We see adults — people with so much more life lived and experience that we imagine might make us whole — still stuck in this unflattering phase of self-obsession and insecurity. We see how it ravages the soul and turns you into a shell that exists only to please all of the others who don’t actually care. To be young is to want to grow up, to want so desperately that perspective and strength of character, but to be too transfixed by the mirror to walk out the door."
--- What It Means To Be Young - Chelsea Fagan
 credits: skinofrazorfluxflickr / razorflux / xstacy |