The thing about teenagers is most are at about the same place in life: struggling to find their own identities and beliefs and dreams amidst a sea of hormones, scared and pessimistic about the big corporate world and all its sharp corners ahead of them, but still mostly alive and making it through for those odd moments of bliss and friends and family. That’s where my own friends are, at least, and that’s where Holden Caulfield was, and that’s where I am. Now, the thing about this thing about teenagers is they are mostly conscious of this fact and resent it. I do, at the very least. I swear, if I ever become a writer, to never write a novel targeted at teenagers, because of the ridiculous ease of such a task. I say just add to your character angst and selfishness and self-loathing and we’ll be soft-hearted enough to sympathize, even me. Oh, sadly, me: reader of A Clockwork Orange and The Great Gatsby and Ulysses in my freshman year. Listen, every teen hipster has a soft underbelly. We’re all catchers in the rye, keen on keeping those of our kind from the cruel of the corporate nightmare, all hail the subculture. We’re all a soft-hearted, cynical, lost bunch. Exhibit A: me. My life. What can we make of it? At the moment, we have (1) my five family members fearfully grabbing at what is left of my descent into sinful bohemianism, fasting for me, pleading with me, inspiring in me a guilt which watches over every sentimental moment I can hope to have with them. And then we have (2) one of my closest friends constantly stealing the spotlight with his highly cultured tastes, his brilliant mind, his admirable morality—oh, I do worship him, but do I bore him with my vulgar and unintelligent chatter?
We have (3) another friend who has opened up to me recently. Another, because—get this: every year I have maybe half a dozen people opening up their deepest, darkest secrets to me and thinking of me as their best friend. Oh, of course, I love them opening up. I do. And I love him. But when this sort of thing isn’t reciprocated, I just feel awful and drained. Or at least I think that’s the problem. And then we have these three friends over here (4), all quite happy people, and my favorites of the bunch. Little do they suspect: I feel horribly inadequate around them. Why? Every attempt to express affection comes off as stiff and unnatural, especially around that one girl. Now I withdraw when I see them, for sake of self-respect. Ah, selfish me! Do they suspect I dislike them? Lastly we have (5) a long distance relationship devoid of all feeling, Along with (6) a possible online crush--a sad girl of 15 who looks for comfort--to compensate. In summary, then: this current life is one defined by: five family ties, five close friendships, one online friendship-on-the-brink-of-romance, one stale long distance romance— all pervaded by sinful sycophancy, self-consciousness, and a (not entirely unfounded) sense of inadequacy. And guilt over it, mind you: I realize in all of this that I am committing the horrible and heinous offense of forfeiting authenticity for acceptance, paving the first tiles on the way to a corporate hell of act and tact. Continuing the example, I add to this tangle of thorns a something called “school,” which attacks every already-stressful afternoon social encounter with reminders of unfinished work from the night before, or failed subjects, or unsatisfying SAT scores. I fight it, of course. I scorn this Tool of the Man and all its worldly values of wealth and power, I tell yourself you don’t care and your highest goal is to own a bookstore and maybe a cat. But my stomach tells the truth in aching pangs: I, simply incompetent and in denial. Finally, in my room alone there are my attempts to escape with naïve dreams of childhood—my goals of life on the road, of offering ear and shoulder for come-and-go friends, of living for the miraculous and mind-boggling people that populate every corner of this stark existence!, of dying a savior—now crumbling away at the edges—Dear reader, behold, Exhibit A, (proudly written in a silly sort of mock-pretentious style that may quite possibly have been stolen from a certain narrator in a certain favorite novel, and excuse my temporary lack of identity)—such is the life, I think, of the mess that is the teenager; caught between a drive for authenticity and identity and an endless love for friends and family, fighting the gears of the corporate machine, picking up the vestiges of values and dreams after their foundations have fallen away, and for the first time getting fleeting glances at the still ineffable face of empty, such is the life.
