All signs point to Swift Syndrome

It's not a real thing, but if it were I'd have been diagnosed long ago. Luckily I'm already on the treatment plan.

In the early days of my personal Facebook experience, I had a problem with fishing for mystery. I was in high school, which I guess excuses the vanity somewhat. But it's clear by my "status" past that I had the tendency to be over-the-top, random and very very cryptic.

But underneath the dramatic tone lurked a bigger picture - one of emotional and societal intrigue. And I was never afraid to be absolutely frank - without revealing anything at all - on social media sites.

A few years after joining Facebook, I started listening to Taylor Swift. I loved her catchy music and the emotional power of her lyrics - even if that "power" only appealed to silly girls under the age of 20. She could write about whatever was on her mind and everyone would listen and be on her side.

But not all of us are Taylor Swift. Not everyone is on our side when we start grumbling over a boy who hurt us and never using his name (or using his name and then never breaching the subject in public ever again). There's not much more to her lyrical stories than that - boys, boys, boys and drama, drama, drama. Since we're not Taylor and we can't crank out hit after hit that bash our ex-lovers, we have to find other outlets. Enter in the Facebook News Feed.

I think our openness comes from this internal perception filter that convinces us that we will never be held accountable for what we share on our Facebook walls/timelines. Even though we know that we have a few hundred friends who have access to whatever we decide to post, we think nothing of it and often go on sharing our deepest darkest ruminations even when they end up being pretentious, obnoxious or even depressing.

We're not Taylor, as I've said, so we know that we won't get views from all of our "friends." But we're also purposely blind to the fact that when we do share, we're leaving a permanent mark of our melodrama on a relatively public online location. And we're even more blind to the fact that, unlike Taylor, no one cares what we have to say about our sad lives. In fact, they'd much rather ignore it than be reminded of it every time they log into their favorite social networking site.

Traces of this Taylor Swift Syndrome go all the way back to a little rinky dink website that I used to use called MySpace. In a time of middle school naiveté, I spent an evening finding photos online of some of my favorite celebrities and compiling a list of the traits belonging to the "Perfect Man."

My favorite delegation on the list was "seeming innocence of Michael Cera." It also included such luminaries as Ryan Gosling and James McAvoy. Things haven't changed much, except my own sanity.

The problem with Swift Syndrome is it drives you to strange lengths to try and make a point. Like TSwift with her music, sufferers like myself had trouble with holding in our strange inner monologue. We would assume all of our thoughts were gold - including song lyrics and depressed musings on how no one felt romantically for us. Instead of just letting those feelings go, we shared them in MySpace bulletins and blogs, Facebook notes and status updates. And we did it stealthily - at least we thought so.

It became ridiculous. So much so that it has forever tainted my view of Facebook, to the point that whenever someone posts a song lyric or clip on the site, I assume it has some autobiographical meaningfulness.

I guess to some extent that assumption is true. Most people use social networking as a way to let the "real them" (or what they consider the real them) shine through their media tastes and witticisms in 140 characters or less. On Facebook they post YouTube clips or blog posts (do you see me physically wincing?) that serve as personal diatribes on the toils of teenagehood.

For someone like Taylor Swift who has a massive following and millions of listeners who would gladly hear her vent about John Mayer or Jake Gyllenhaal, this method of ranting and raving in a condensed form (for her music) works out just fine. But for the rest of us it is slightly petty and immature.

Since getting a Facebook, I've gone through a progression of being more careful about how much of me I insert into the website. Instead of writing histrionic sentences about how stressed or depressed or lovestruck I was, I started just sharing information when it was important or when I felt it was somewhat relevant to my "audience."

Still, it's hard not to get caught up by Swift Syndrome. The desire to spill our souls to the insulated world that envelopes us under that blue toolbar is ever-tempting. I've been known to delete posts because I've looked back and realized I'd let myself fall victim to my own bent toward the melodramatic.

So I guess it's a constant struggle. We're stuck in the middle of two opposing forces. The first is our hearts, begging us to tell the world how we feel. The heart longs for sympathy, for companionship, for someone to agree and "like" what we posted so we can feel some sort of unanimity and interconnectedness with our "friends."

But the other part is the mind. The mind wants us to let go of those issues in life that most wear on us. Instead of letting the heart take over, the mind wants to force us out of our funks in whatever way will keep us furthest from danger in the future.

In my opinion the mind sounds like the angel on my shoulder, the heart a devilish fiend on the other shoulder trying to get me to bring out the worst in myself - and share it with my little internet world, population 300.

That being said, "The Story of Us" is my own vicarious diatribe.

For me, Swift Syndrome has been on one side the desire to be like Taylor - to write songs like "Better than Revenge" or "The Story of Us" and post them all over the place so people might "understand" what I'm going through. But the dramatics don't work if you're not Taylor Swift. And that's what the mind wants you to know. The heart will keep telling you that someone will eventually care about your complaints. But the heart is wrong.

Facebook encourages us to share ourselves with the world, but it also teaches us to be careful about what we want to share with the world. There is so much at our fingertips, we just have to figure out how to use it. Let's leave the teardrops to Taylor on her guitar and away from our keyboards.

Psychosomatic is problematic

A lot of things terrify me. Meeting new people, talking with people I'm uncomfortable with, going in front of crowds, answering a question in class, singing in public, auditioning for anything, going to a social event or even a meeting by myself, talking with a clerk at a retail sales counter.

Some are logical. Some are illogical. All are avoidable. But I can't.

In elementary school it wasn't so much a problem. I could get up in front of my class or even audition to perform in a school musical with minimal inhibitions. When I got to middle school, however, somehow everything turned around and my mind got the better of me.

It got the better of me and it brought out the worst in me.

When I was in choir in middle school, I was one of the "star" sopranos. I barely needed to audition, but I would be rewarded with a solo performance anyway. Practicing the solo, I always felt prepared to make a stellar performance in concerts. Then when the pressure was on for the debut performance, my vocal cords would turn to jelly and my notes would become wobbly instead of crisp and strong.

After middle school, I lost all sense of the confident girl I was before. Even in casual class settings, my voice would turn into that of an untrained vocalist warbling on a bumpy car ride. One day in high school choir, we were required to perform in a private room in front of the instructor, singing a song we'd memorized from another language. I picked "Mon Histoire" from Les Misérables, the French version of "On My Own."

With only a couple of classmates in the room, one of whom was my best friend, I still couldn't help but let my nervousness get the better of me. I got an A on the assignment, but only because the song was at such a low octave that my wobbling couldn't be heard very well.

I let the problem slide because it only really affected me when I was in front of a crowd singing. That wasn't going to be a regular occurrence, so I needn't work on it.

Then I became a journalist.

High school was child's play for a budding young writer. I reported only a hand-full of times for my school newspaper, starting with opinion and entertainment stories soon after I joined the paper, keeping me forever guarded from having to talk to anyone new.

In college, I was thrust into the real world where interviews were hard to come by, but still had to be done. I did my first man on the street interview not knowing how to conduct myself. I ended up exchanging an interview with an activist for a "few minutes of my time." She talked to me about hunger in Africa. I asked her about The Daily Show. The symbiosis of the relationship wasted a good 15 minutes of my time when it should have taken five. Social conduct was difficult for me to understand, especially in this unusually structured form.

Over the years I've constantly stuck myself into new and strange situations that take me out of my comfort zone. It started with the singing, continued with the reporting and onward. At every step along the way, I learned more about myself - but I could never seem to conquer the psychosomatic symptoms that accompanied all of my ventures.

The worst kind of situation is that in which you are made vulnerable as a result. Being a student singer or a writer, you're still guarded by the fact that you're learning. Everything is new to you, but you're under the veil of being in high school or college. And people judge you accordingly.

When I had my first boyfriend I was put in a similar situation of being completely out of my league - not because he fell under the cliche "out of my league," but because I wasn't prepared for a relationship or aware of how much of myself I was making vulnerable. Every time we'd meet I would spend an hour prior feeling nervous and nauseous. I'd sit with a friend in person or on the phone trying to distract myself to keep away the stomach discomfort.

Then I learned the key to destroying my own psychosomatic symptoms - especially the nausea. The fact that I had been meditating on prospects for an hour was what made me nervous, not the event itself. This was true of singing, of interviewing, of talking to new people, of even asking a question in class. It was when I wasn't spontaneous - when I spent too much time thinking about expectations - that I let my unconscious mind get the better of me.

Five minutes into any nerve-wracking experience, I've always found myself the victor over my own psychosomatic symptoms.

When I auditioned for a cappella groups in freshman year, my goal was to hit at least four groups in one afternoon. By the time I arrived at my fourth audition, I had gotten past the nervous wobbly warbling and I was singing as well as I do into my hair brush in the privacy of my own bedroom.

So I found the key. But the lock was still evasive.

Even though I'd figured out that after a few minutes in an awkward situation I start to feel at ease and even, dare I say it, confident, I still had no control over that hour-long period (or sometimes slightly shorter if it was a spur of the moment nervousness) of feeling overwhelmed.

I still don't know how to go about fixing this.

I could spend hours trying to psychoanalyze myself. It would even be appropriate perhaps since I am taking a class that directly addresses the theories of Freud and psychoanalysis. But I wouldn't know where to begin.

Though I have the clarity of knowing how my mind manipulates my body, I've never had manipulative control over my own mind or body. A lot of people manage to bridge the gap, keeping themselves from feeling nervous in uncomfortable situations, or avoiding people or things that would put them in a state of unease.

Yet I have this problem of doing the exact opposite - of testing my boundaries by constantly giving myself new problems to tackle. If I hate interviewing, then I still assign myself stories that require a lot of it. If I feel nervous singing, then I try auditioning for musicals and singing groups anyway. If I know I'll feel uncomfortable meeting up with an ex, then I make plans with them against my better judgment.

It's weird, but I have this masochistic proclivity toward putting myself in what are, by my estimation, the worst situations. The problem is that, despite my own distaste for certain experiences, I can't stop making myself do the things I know are difficult for me.

Maybe this is a learning exercise - I'd guess psychologists and psychoanalysts would say it's my own personal way of working through my nervous neuroses - but it's also one of the most destructive ways of doing so.

Lately I've been working through my own desires to branch out. I have tried to lessen the burden of nervous experience on myself by reminding my unconscious mind that I can be more confident with practice. And it works to some extent.

So I'll go on being awkward and forcing myself into awkward situations. It's a weird fate, but I'm going to need to talk to that store clerk somehow.

Pixar knows me

I was on the El returning from a class in the city. All of my classmates had claimed seats and I was left to choose among the several empty two-seater rows. I sat down next to the window, pulled out my iPod and shuffled it on up.

There were a few stinkers. Even I will admit that my iPod is not full of awesome songs. Most of the time I'll sync it with whatever I've randomly uploaded onto iTunes, regardless of if I've even listened to an album all the way through. Sometimes when I shuffle the thing, a dozen songs will pop up that I only recognize the titles of. So I move on.

I skipped past some songs I didn't feel quite in the mood for. Past McFly and some musical theater (gasp). Then a little ditty came on that I haven't listened to for a few weeks, but that I absolutely love. It was Randy Newman's "We Belong Together."

"We Belong Together" written & performed by Randy Newman

Back in elementary school I wasn't huge on the Toy Story films. Granted, I'd seen them both multiple times. And I did know the songs. But for me Pixar seemed like a boy's club, catering to boy culture. I wasn't allowed in - and if I was it would be going against my traditional 2D Disney animation roots.

To some extent I was on the fence about how much enthusiasm I had for the third and final film in the Toy Story trilogy. But because in the last several years I'd become enamored with Pixar culture, I decided to go in with an open mind. I was finally more aware of the greatness that can be created by some imaginative computer software nerds (I say this with the utmost affection and envy because I'd love to be one of those nerds), and there was no looking back.

"Kitty!"

Monsters, Inc. proved to me that there was room for emotions even in this perceived boy's club. To this day, I will not go through a viewing of the movie without reminding everyone in the room that it was the first film that ever made me cry. In the final scene in which Sully returns to Boo after sending her home and watching her door be destroyed, the word "Kitty" unplugged my tear ducts and made me feel like a weirdo sitting in a room full of unaffected children and their parents.

I loved the character of Boo after seeing the film. That Halloween I bought a giant pink shirt and my own Little Mikey stuffed toy so I could pretend I was the adorable little girl who couldn't stop saying "Mike Wazowski."

When Finding Nemo came out a couple years later, it was just another piece of evidence that Pixar was a force to be reckoned with, not only with its niche audience of boys under the age of 12, but in mass appeal through its pairing of beautiful artistry and wonderfully concocted stories with realistic relationships embedded in them.

The movie showed us that a father-son relationship could be as strong and as hard to travel as the EAC (oh, I'm so clever), but that in the end devotion and friendship can power you through any difficult circumstance. Ellen DeGeneres as Dory added an even greater aspect to these films - the memorable comedy that placed Pixar in a spot of greatness away from traditional animated films that cater to children and into its own generation-crossing category.

And then came the most beautiful (and my favorite) Pixar film, WALL-E. While earlier Pixar films had illustrated a surface level romance between characters like Woody and Bo Peep (Toy Story), Flik and Princess Atta (A Bug's Life) and Mike and Celia (Monsters, Inc.) among others, there was nothing that could come even close to the loveliness that was WALL-E and EVE.

WALL-E and EVE.

The relationship between those two characters rivals even the best romantic films, and they weren't even human. Just watching WALL-E made me feel like love is possible in the world - a kindred spirit might exist despite the barrenness that surrounds us. When WALL-E grabbed at EVE's hand, though it was firmly pressed against her as she sat in some sort of sleep mode to protect the plant WALL-E had found on earth, I felt my own heart swell with how wonderful romance can be - even if at the time I'd never been as in love as these two little robots.

Not even a year later, Pixar came out with one of the most touching scenes of any film ever created - a feat they were able to accomplish in less than five minutes. Carl and Ellie's love story in Up, though surrounded by a film that I was not that enthusiastic by, was one of the most amazing short montages I've ever seen. This cemented my original theory that Pixar had graduated from wonderful stories about guardian-child relationships (Monster's Inc. & Finding Nemo) to beautiful tales of romance and lost love.

And finally came the story of loss of self and embracing the future, Toy Story 3. When I finally returned to this series in my senior year of high school, it hit home in a way that the first two films in the trilogy never quite could. Instead of being simply about the personal plights of a bunch of toys belonging to some nebulous boy who wasn't really much of a character at all (I'm sorry, Andy, but you really weren't that interesting), Toy Story 3 brought together the toys we had watched in the first two films with their owner in a way that connected on an emotional level.

Andy, if you were real I would have a huge crush on you.

Many people will cite the final scene when Andy gives away his toys to a little girl named Bonnie as among the most touching moments of any Pixar film. For me, a girl who hadn't really connected with the Toy Story films much prior to watching the third installment, it was the beginning of a new realization that this silly film trilogy about a boy and his toys had all of these intratextual messages and morals that made it among the best films of all time.

When I was watching Toy Story 3 in the theater with my friends, I was crying because I felt a kinship with Andy. He was going away to college the same year I was. Coincidence would have it that the film would come out just a few months before I went off to school far away from home, leaving behind all my beloved toys and mementos.

When I was listening to "We Belong Together," the beautiful Academy Award winning song from Toy Story 3, on the way back from class today, I was crying because I was reminded of all that Pixar represented for me. Not just the relationship I had with Andy after watching the final Toy Story film. Not just the admiration I felt for Marlin's devotion to his son in Finding Nemo. Not just the romance between WALL-E and EVE that I aspired to in WALL-E.

It was all of those things combined.

Randy Newman is known for his upbeat pop songs and tender ballads filled with cultural references and wonderful melody lines. But what he's less known for (regardless of it being absolutely essential to his style), is his wonderful way of connecting us back to our youth and ourselves through his music.

"We Belong Together" is a wonderful song about friendship and loyalty. Underneath its very catchy exterior lurks a message of hope even for those who lack the fulfillment of finding true love or even true friendship. "The day I met you was the luckiest day of my life," he sings.

While I sat by myself, I was overcome by a feeling of sadness that I had never been able to find the love of Carl and Ellie, of WALL-E and EVE, of even Mike and Celia. I lamented over the loss of my mother.

But I also felt such luck at having so many people in my life who love and care for me. All these feelings brought forth by one little song by Randy Newman.

Not only is Pixar the perfect melding of sadness and beauty, of hopefulness and loss, it is also a testament to how all of these things can be translated into a wonderful enveloping text - the medium of animated film.

When I was little I had no idea how great Pixar was. Even a few years later, I couldn't quite grasp it. But now I feel like I know Pixar. Or at least Pixar knows me.

Ring of Memories

When my mom passed away, it wasn't just her that I lost. It was all those little memories, packed up in boxes and donated to Goodwill or the Salvation Army or even sold at garage sales that were lost too.

I have always valued my physical possessions, almost to an unhealthy extent. I own secret locked containers and create special hiding places for everything that matters to me. And it's not about keeping personal safety deposit boxes strewn throughout my house or anything like that.

It's just about feeling the comfort of being surrounded by memories and mementos that make me feel connected to my past. I've never been able to let go of that security blanket.

Sometime while walking from my dorm to the student center on campus, I managed to lose something that, by sitting on my left-hand ring finger for about a year, had given me a sort of inexplicable security. There is no explanation for the feelings I ascribed to the little turquoise-colored ring. Just that once I'd worn it for a time, it felt like an extension of my being.

It had belonged to my mom. In the process of going through boxes of junk that were hers when she was alive, I happened upon brooches and freshwater pearl bracelets, pendants and mounds of plastic jewelry. They were all meaningless playthings.

The lost ring and me looking ridiculous.

But then in the rubble, I found a little oval ring that looked cheap, but was colored turquoise. It looked valuable to me. I had never seen my mom wear it, though. Yet it felt special. While most of my mom's rings didn't fit right on me, this ring did. So I put it on and I didn't take it off.

Each night I would remove the rings from my fingers, now having accumulated three that I wore on a regular basis. I'd place them on my desk and go to bed, obsessive-compulsively checking to be sure they were still there so I could return them to their rightful place on my fingers in the morning.

This went on for a year.

But today, somehow I was careless. The turquoise-colored ring I'd treated with such tender love and care was taken for granted, slipped off my finger somehow, some way, probably never to be seen again.

It didn't take me long to notice. Less than 15 minutes before, I remember having the ring on my finger. But by the time I'd lost it, it was too late to go back and find it. Time had passed and people had crossed the path I'd wandered. It was gone.

Some would say it's weird to ascribe so much emotional meaning to such a measly little object as a cheap ring. But for me, it was a symbol of my relationship with my mom, my loss of her and how she was still ever-present in my life.

Not long before she passed away, my mom lost the diamond from her wedding ring. It was a small diamond, easily forgotten if one did not check on it regularly. So once it was gone, there was no getting it back. Though my parents had been divorced for a time, the ring still meant a lot to her. She was broken-hearted when she lost the diamond.

For my mom, losing the main charm of her wedding ring was a terrible thing to experience and overcome. Like the marriage she'd lost, she had to contend with a residual pain of having a symbol of that marriage fall apart as well. She continued to wear the ring, despite the missing diamond.

I walk away from this experience feeling regret and anger that such an emotionally valuable heirloom was lost to me in such an insignificant instant. It could have been either of my other rings. It could have been anywhere. But it had to be the ring that had belonged to my mother, which I had been wearing on the same finger from which she had lost her wedding ring diamond.

Since her passing, I've noticed a lot of parallels in mine and my mom's life. Like me she was intelligent and driven, she was unassuming and introverted, she didn't begin dating until she was quite older. As much as I've tried to convince myself that we are incredibly different people, I've also come to recognize that we're in so many ways the same person.

Maybe it was fate that forced my ring away from me. It was time to lose that connection with my mom that has made me determine that I am so like her, perhaps even to the extent that I expect my life to play out in the same way she has.

It's not that I want to ascribe greater meaning to a situation like this, but sometimes in unusual situations - i.e. when a ring that you've been wearing every day for a year falls off your finger - you can't help but notice how histories collide.

A lot of my time has been spent thinking about how my life parallels my mother's. It has worried me and made me constantly aware of my path in life and whether I'm making the same mistakes that she did.

I know that I would never want to pine like my mom after a lost piece of jewelry representing a failed marriage. I would never want to expect my life to play out like hers simply because of a few similarities.

Maybe it's a superstitious belief that has brought me to a happier conclusion, but I can't help but hope that a situation as bad as this is accompanied by a message of hope. After years of worrying that my fate in life will be a mirror image of my mother's, I'm finally being told to stop holding onto her history. Especially on that left-hand ring finger.

Still, it's nice to have a reason to look down every day and think about a lost loved one. So even if I never get the chance to be reunited with my mom's ring, I will look for other jewelry in her massive conglomeration of personal artifacts. And I will create a connection with one of those items instead.

But I will never let it stand for that same symbolism that my turquoise ring stood for. While I never want to let go of my mom, I also don't want to give her such control over my life. Just a guiding hand and a place among my mementos and memories.

Never grow out, grow up

There was a time when I would watch TV shows about disorders and anomalies without any hint of irony. Sitting down to an episode of Oprah or Tyra or [insert name of strong-willed woman here], I'd learn about the many diseases I could have been born with - one of which was a thing called Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome.

Progeria is a genetic condition in which patients appear to age quickly, usually passing away by the age of 13. It's a very stunning and depressing disorder. And though it only affects about 80 people in the world today, it's a frightening concept to even consider living such a short life that plays out like the final moments of Benjamin Button in reverse. The aging process runs quickly, and the clock runs out way before its time.

I've thought about what my life is like in respect to the passing of time, and though it's unfair to compare myself to an individual who might suffer premature death due to a medical condition, I'm going to take the leap. Because the fact is that for much of my life I've felt like one of those children with progeria who watches their life pass before their eyes. I experience growth and "maturity" (for them it's in a physical respect, for me it's more of a mental change) much faster than the rest of the world.

In preschool I was not atypical by any means. Though a few years later I ended up in advanced classes, I won't hesitate to remind anyone who knew me when that I used to pretend I was one of the Land Before Time characters and that I regularly ate beads for fun as a toddler.

Even then, though, I was developing a proclivity for being the unfashionable know-it-all. I would tell my friends at the lunch table that if food fell on the ground, you did not eat it. The five-second rule did not apply because we knew very well that once food hits the ground it's no longer clean.

Little bouts of vain maturity and knowledge of the "real world" made me think that I was slightly out of place in a group of children who would drop the crackers from their Lunchables on the ground and then proceed to throw cheese and ham onto them and pretend nothing had happened. Where were my fellow plate-eaters?

While little things like eating off the ground came to stand for logic rather than intelligence as we grew up, I still had this feeling that I was coming to terms with age faster - maybe too much faster - than my peers.

When I left kindergarten, the year when I attended a magnet school, my mom used to always tell me I'd learned at five years old what most kids learn at age eight. That theory of life persisted for years on.

In fourth grade, one of my good friends was a girl named Meggie. In my new "Gift and Talented" program, there were only a few people I hung out with on a daily basis. Meggie was one of them.

One day, while sitting in the classroom, I remember finding a note she'd written that had fallen on the ground. I picked it up and saw a bunch of doodles of me and my class mates on individual strips of Post-Its. I was about to hand it back to her, when I noticed near the top of the pile an image with the label "Rachel" under it.

When I looked at the Post-It Note in full, I saw that the caption that was written above was "Miss Perfect."

I didn't talk to Meggie for a while afterwards. Though we had been friends for a few months, at the time it disturbed me that someone I thought I could trust had labeled me as something that, while poking fun, had a pretty negative connotation from her perspective. I realized that if she had conspired - probably with a few other girls - to illustrate me with such a negative caption, that we probably weren't as good of friends as I had thought.

This was a petty way of handling the situation, I admit. But being nine, I couldn't help but think of myself as the victor of morality against the heartless Meggie. However unintentionally, she'd been so insensitive as to demonize one of her closest acquaintances in class - preferring to be a petty schoolgirl than an honest friend.

By the next school year, Meggie and I were on relatively good terms. Our relationship never returned to normal, though. In sixth grade she reverted back to her Mean Girls-esque ways, planning to hang out by the jungle gym with her new friends and purposely leaving me out of the loop.

I spent my breaks and lunch hours sitting by myself against a wall reading children's chapter books, thinking about how miserable I was that all of these girls whom I thought I could trust had decided to throw the potential for friendship down the toilet in exchange for bitter girl-on-girl cruelty.

Even in college, I've felt a burden of being a little bit too old for my place. Never hesitating to remind friends that I don't drink or do drugs or do anything even remotely promiscuous, I become a social outlier who reads more like a cloistered nun than a happy university student. While at times I embrace my image, other times I spurn it for putting me at such a disadvantage on the collegiate social scene.

Today, talking with my friend Dana about the dim prospects for romance and relationships in college, we commiserated about often feeling like the only people willing to talk to us are those who are similarly inclined toward the happily inhibited life.

It's not that I scorn the lives that most people live. Looking down at people doesn't bring clarity to anything at all. What I do scorn is the separation between people like us (Dana and our other friends and myself) and the general population at even the most prestigious universities - in essence the separation between obedient youth and rebellious youth.



It's human nature to unintentionally gravitate toward like-minded people, so I don't fool myself into believing that becoming close to people with such inherently different values from mine might be plausible.

Instead, as I talked with Dana, I reasoned that it's an easy, yet difficult to accept, defeat to decide that in the future, perhaps, people will transition from rebellious teenagehood to established adulthood.

Before I leave this post, though, I'd like to make a disclaimer about the nature of my argument. It's not that I disapprove or feel any sort of disdain for the choices of others. Being an avid book-reader, TV-watcher and film enthusiast, I'm no stranger to the excitement of rebellious life. And the temptations of the invincibility of our youth is undeniable.


But it still raises this eternal question in me: Why do we need to test our fallibility? Are we so afraid of our eventual descent into old age, and perhaps our meeting with mortality?

It becomes this whole existential argument about why we make our decisions in the first place - whether we're deciding things from a purely animalistic bent, or if perhaps we're putting our lives into perspective and choosing experience thusly.

I like to think I do the latter. And maybe that's why I also consider myself a sufferer from psychological progeria. When I think too much about the meaning of life and the fact that I'd rather live it as a slightly sheltered, very self-aware person, then I make decisions that are against the norm.

So I guess I alienate myself. Though I'd love to live differently - to happily incorporate my sober self into an occasionally sordid life, maybe even just for the authorial experience, I can't stand the idea of being untrue to who I am.

Like the Know-it-All and the Little Miss Perfect that I was as a child, I guess I'll never grow out of growing up.